
Class 

Book_ ; 

CCROUGHT DEPOSHV 



3(3t 



OF MAKING ONE'S SELF 
BEAUTIFUL. 



WRITINGS BY WILLIAM C. GANNETT, 

OF MAKING ONE'S SELF BEAUTIFUL. Cloth, 
131 pages, neatly stamped, 50 cents ; special hand- 
some gift edition, $1.00. 

A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. Paper, choice 
edition, 15 cents; cheap edition, 6 cents. 

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. The ideal home and 
the " dear togetherness." Cloth, 50 cents ; white 
and gold, full gilt, in box, 75 cents. (Paper, choice 
edition, 15 cents; cheap edition, 6 cents.) 

THE SPARROW'S FALL. Paper, 15 cents. 

CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. Paper, choice 
edition, 15 cents ; cheap edition, 6 cents. 

BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. Paper, 10 cents. 

THE SUNDAY I WOULD KEEP. Paper, 6 cents. 

GREEN. PASTURES AND STILL WATERS. 
Three Poems of Consolation. Paper, 15 cents. 

THE LITTLE CHILD AT THE BREAKFAST 
TABLE. Poems and Selected Passages for 
Children. Paper, 20 cents. 

■*> 
JAMES H. WEST CO., Publishers, Boston. 



OF MAKING ONE'S SELF 
BEAUTIFUL 



BY 

WILLIAM C. GANNETT 

Author of " Blessed be Drudgery," "A Year of Miracle,' 
etc., etc. 



^4 



BOSTON 
JAMES H. WEST COMPANY 



\ 



TWO COPIES 

y" of CongfilU 

'ice c f tha 

bgister of CopjrljRf^ 



4S442 

Copyright, 1899, 
By WILLIAM C. GANNETT. 



SECOND COPY, 



c 7~ HIS little book is an up-gathering. In some 
form or other the papers printed here have 
all seen print before, but much has been rewritten. 
There are probably echoes running from one to another 
of the five. Certainly there are many echoes from 
other minds in all of them. One or two seem to 
be almost compact of echoes. All thanks to the 
originators of whatever may be good. 

W. C. G. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Of Faces and Their Making 11 

Culture without College 85 

The Thorn-Bearer 63 

A Recipe for Good Cheer 75 

The House Beautiful 107 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 



tf;f 



I. 

Everything is wonderful and opens into the 
vast : why call the human face the greatest 
wonder ? Because it is the spot where that which 
we call " mind " comes nearest to the surface of 
that which we call " matter." Language reveals 
the unseen self within us thinking, the face 
reveals the unseen self within us feeling, — the 
one reporting to the ear, the other to the eye. 
Of all the sounds on earth a word, of all the 
sights on earth a human face, make us aware 
there is a world within the world. Therefore 
are these two things, a word, a face, the two 
arch-wonders of creation. 

In this lies hint why one face is so beautiful, 
another face so plain. The two main laws of face- 



12 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

making seem to be, (1) that the face grows from 
within outwards, (2) that each face represents 
not only the individual's within, but also that of 
ancestors ; the second law being really but the 
remoter reaches of the first. Would we watch 
the process of face-making, we must visit the 
anatomist, and pass with him behind the veil of 
skin to see the mechanism of nerve and muscle 
by which the unseen self is constantly pressing 
towards the gates of vision. To the source of 
mind he never penetrates ; but he shows us that 
each thought and feeling, as it issues from that 
secret source, comes leaping over nerves that are 
as foot-paths to it, and muscles that are as high- 
ways which the foot-paths join; and that every 
time they pass, they leave a track behind. One 
traveler on a road counts nothing; a thousand 
hardly count ; but by and by the rut appears. In 
the tufa galleries of the Eoman catacombs the 
guide points with reverence to the hollowed steps, 
and tells us they were hollowed by the tread of 
" thousands of martyrs " centuries ago : somewhat 
so the traveling thoughts and feelings wear the 
hidden roads that lie beneath the skin. And as 
the city pavements bear witness of the traffic, 
whether it be much or little, whether it be of 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 13 

heavy carts or foot-passengers, whether the main 
current goes on this side of the street or that, so 
at last do the nerves and muscles betray the nature 
of the thoughts and feelings habitually passing 
over them. A "habit," physiologically consid- 
ered, is but the constant use of certain nerves 
and muscles. 

Our whole body tells more or less of this 
inward travel-story; but the face is the outlet 
where myriads of these thought-paths and these 
alleys for emotion converge and blend. Hither, 
as to a city's central mart, the inward travelers 
speed, every passion using its own familiar path- 
ways, and stepping with its own peculiar gait 
upon them. Steadily the world within thus 
prints itself upon the outward features. We 
can watch the process in every baby's countenance 
as the little forehead fills and the features deploy 
as on parade. Probably our mother's pride led 
her to preserve the likeness of our early self in 
seried photographs, and we laugh now over the 
stages of our dawn from cubbishness to the glories 
of our perfect day. Often during that long dawn 
our friends whispered to each other, " See that 
habit growing on him, — it is telling on his very 
look." It was some strengthening principle of 



14 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

right, or some besetting sin in us ; and what they 
noticed, corresponding to the change in character, 
was a candor or a vagueness growing in our eyes, 
an ennoblement, or else a degradation, of our 
mouth-lines, a bracing or a drooping of our chin. 
A hundred counteracting qualities may operate 
to slow and vary the process. One may even 
school himself into a partial masking of it. But 
all the time it goes on quietly and certainly. 
Seldom can one reach his thirtieth year without 
having his past history distinctly sculptured, and 
his future history dimly prophesied, upon his 
face. — To this we shall return. 

But when the process has been going on through 
generations, each transmitting to the next its 
prevailing habits till they become so strong that 
we forget their origin and call them " instincts," 
then the very bones of the face turn tell-tales 
of the world within. The children's "family 
features " chorus, as it were, the themes in the 
parents' characters. If Jesus' face shone on the 
mount, part of the shining was the light of 
Mary's coming through. And if ever a devil 
glares from a child's angry eyes, the devil has 
very likely been a family visitor, and in that 
scowl is simply coming to his own. Every fam- 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING, 15 

ily portrait-gallery pictures the dominant disposi- 
tion and brain-power of the lineage. " Blood 
tells " is but another way of saying " bone tells " ; 
for blood builds bone, — and even tone. Doctor 
Holmes's valentine to his great grandmother 
claims for the Yes that cost the maiden her 
Norman name, — 

" There were tones in the voice that whispered then 
You may hear to-day in a hundred men.' ' 

The " Bourbon nose w of France, the " royal jaw ,; 
of Austria, are historic. The forefathers with 
their virtues and their vices, their sorrows and 
struggles, their failures and victories, their oaths 
and jokes and laughs and sighs, were moulding 
the set of our children's chin and the very curves 
of their smiling and their crying lip. Few such 
devotees of Nature and her Beauty as the English 
Jefferies : he held that it takes at least five gen- 
erations of country air and exercise, with suffic- 
ing comforts and refinements in the home, for 
the advent of a beautiful woman on the earth. 
One hundred and fifty years ago a yeoman's 
athletic son wedded a girl of health, strength, 
charm equal to his own. They prosper and their 
home enriches, and under such conditions the son 



16 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

is taller than his father, the daughter comelier 
than her mother. "Another generation, and the 
family becomes noted as handsome. The chin 
has rounded, the cheek-bones sink, the ears are 
smaller, the texture of the skin is finer. The 
handsome intermarry with the handsome, and 
the improvement continues. In the fifth genera- 
tion she comes — the type of perfect health and 
female loveliness by inheritance." * And now 
our page shall hold, though long, the lovely 
passage : — 

" She walks, and the very earth smiles beneath 
her feet. A hundred and fifty years at the 
least — more probably twice that — have passed 
away, while from all enchanted things of earth 
and air this preciousness has been drawn. From 
the south wind that breathed a century and a 
half ago over the green wheat. From the per- 
fume of the growing grasses waving over honey- 
laden clover and laughing veronica, hiding the 
greenfinches, baffling the bee. From rose-loved 
hedges, wood-bine, and corn-flower azure-blue, 
where yellowing wheat-stalks crowd up under 

•Condensed from Ellwanger's "Idyllists of the Country- 
side," from whom also I transfer, with thanks to both, the 
lovely words of Jefferies. 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 17 

the shadow of green firs. All the devious brook- 
let's sweetness where the iris stays the sunlight ; 
all the wild-wood's hold of beauty ; all the broad 
hill's thyme and freedom ; thrice a hundred years 
repeated. A hundred years of cow-slips, blue- 
bells, violets ; purple spring and golden autumn ; 
sunshine, shower, and dewy mornings ; the night 
immortal; all the rhythm of Time unrolling. 
A chronicle unwritten and past all power of 
writing: who shall preserve a record of the 
petals that fell from the roses a century ago ? 
The swallows to the house-top three hundred 
times — think a moment of that. Thence she 
sprang, and the world yearns towards her beauty 
as to flowers that are past. The loveliness of 
seventeen is centuries old. Is this why passion 
is almost sad ? " 

Our family galleries are, in turn, but alcoves 
in the national gallery. Sometimes an era of a 
people's history seems to reflect itself in a pre- 
vailing type of face belonging to its heroes ; as 
in the sensitive, oval-chinned, Eenaissance faces 
of Elizabeth's court, or the strong, square-chinned 
type of Cromwell's captains. Each race has a 
well-known cast of countenance, which represents 
its history become organic. Celt, German, Latin, 



18 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

Yankee, walk our streets, needing not their 
brogues to announce their nationality. The 
Grecian outline sought by artists as a model 
is still found in southern Italy, colonized twenty- 
five hundred years ago by Greek settlers. The 
Jewish nose still conies to the front in fifty 
lands, no persecution and no diaspora subduing 
it. Bone tells, — and it tells of cycles as well as 
centuries of life. The slope from the bulge of 
the forehead to the bulge of the upper jaw is 
a rough meridian line by which to estimate rank 
in vertebrate creation : the flatter the slope, the 
lower the type, — the more vertical the slope, the 
higher the type. That horizontal slope memorial- 
izes a stage of progress when the eager jaw was 
still an instrument to seize with, before man 
stood on end, and front legs developed into arms, 
and paws and claws to hands, to relieve the jaws 
of seizing functions. Markham in his poem 
asks, — 

" Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw ? 
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow ? 
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain ? " 

" The masters, lords and rulers in all lands," he 
answers. Accuse them, then, — and shall we next 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 19 

arraign the heavier hand of Nature? That 
brutal jaw and slanted brow are her survivals 
from below. As races civilize, the jaw recedes, 
the brow erects itself, the canine teeth diminish, 
the cheek-bones round to harmony. " The man 
with the hoe " is not a man once made, and then 
by wrong unmade, but man still in the making, 
a shape not straightened up as yet, a brain not 
lit; an arrested development, and not a glory 
quenched. He is really Emerson's man-with-the- 
paws : " We still carry sticking to us some re- 
mains of the preceding inferior quadruped organ* 
ization. We call these millions men; but they 
are not yet men. Half -engaged in the soil, paw- 
ing to get free, man needs all the music that can 
be brought to disengage him." That is the 
larger, truer word, — within which still lies, 
amply roomed, the shameful truth of the indict- 
ment. 

In this light of ancestry, the world behind a 
face is looming large. And if each one of us is 
thus the compress and epitome of generations, 
the fact may go far towards explaining why chin 
and lip and nose in me differ so from those of 
my blood-brother. Perhaps that fair, firm nose 
of his, and mine of tilted tip, were on their way 



20 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

to him, to me, respectively, through different 
sires. Again it may explain why so many saints 
are not beautiful to look upon. There was 
Socrates, the Greek Christ, looking like a satyr, — 
"plain old uncle with big ears, flat nose, bulging 
forehead and retreating chin," — a proverb among 
the beauty-loving Greeks for ugliness. There 
was the good lady whom Charles Lamb describes 
in the Elia paper beginning, " i Handsome is that 
handsome does/ — those who use this proverb can 
never have seen Mrs. Conrady ! " " There is my 
mother," you may be thinking, "my sister, my 
wife, and a dozen of the best saints in town, — 
and there's myself ! There is many a sinner 
worse than I, — and handsomer ! " It's too true. 
But eyes that saw the whole, and all the complex 
links of lineage, might trace each riotous feature 
in us to its wicked source, detect the handsome 
Satans compiling their good looks, and discover 
why the mystery of godliness and the beauty of 
holiness so often fall apart. 

All this our anatomist may tell us, should we 
visit him. If wise as well as knowing, he will 
not dogmatize, but simply claim, " Laws such as 
these we are beginning to discern in face-making." 
And we go awed away. Does not the visit make 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 21 

it plain why no scene of desert, storm or earth- 
quake is so appalling as the human face in ruins ? 
It is because the follies and the sins of genera- 
tions, with those of one more life-time added to 
accentuate them, are focused in this face that 
terrifies us. A face where sin has ploughed its 
gullies deep is a glimpse of the uncovered Hell. 
Woe unto them who have had aught to do, by 
parentage or by example, with the driving of that 
plough ! Is it not also plain why no sunrise, 
mountain-top or June of blossom is so beautiful, 
and so inspiring by its beauty, as human faces at 
their best? The intelligence, morality, ideals, 
of the generations, augmented by the aspirations 
and endeavors of another thirty years, are focused 
in this face that thrills us with delight. A smile 
is the subtlest form of beauty in all the visible 
creation, and Heaven breaks on the earth in the 
smiles of certain faces. 



II. 

But the most practical truth we bring from the 
anatomist, — that each face largely makes itself, 
and from within, — we really knew before we 
heard his story of the process. We know well 



22 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

that it lies in our own power to make ourselves 
handsomer than we were created ; in our power, 
also, to waste and lose whatever birthright-beauty 
we possessed ; and this is the great fact to empha- 
size. Looking upon noble faces, we admire three 
things, — features, color and expression. These 
features, moulds of brow and nose and lip and 
chin, are, in the main, bequests, coming partly, 
as suggested, from far ancestors ; color and com- 
plexion, too, are, in the main, bequests, depend- 
ing on the quality of blood and tissue the imme- 
diate parents furnish; but expression is very 
largely our own affair. And even with fine 
features and the clearest colors, the flashing, 
creeping, loitering changes of expression are " the 
best part of the beauty, that which a picture 
cannot give,— no, nor the first sight of life." 
Those mystic symphonies of thought and will 
and feeling forever played out in auroral silence 
on the face, — we ourselves determine whether 
lofty thoughts, pure self-controls, and gentle, 
generous feelings shall be the elements which 
blend to make them. Not of an instant, seldom 
of a day, is the music born. The transfiguration 
of a pleasant smile, the kindly lightings of the 
eyes, sweet and restful lines around the lips, 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 23 

clear shinings of the face as great thoughts 
kindle inwardly, — these things, which no parent 
makes inevitably ours, no fitful week or two of 
goodness, either, gives; still less, no schooling 
of the visage. Only habitual nobleness and 
graciousness within secure them ; but this will 
bring them all. Some one has said that " every 
face ought to be beautiful at forty n ; and another, 
that " no old person has a right to be ugly, because 
he has had all Ids life in which to grow beautiful." 
That is to say, forty years of opportunity are 
enough to make so much beauty within that it 
cannot help coming to the surface in graceful 
habits of the nerves and muscles. Ten years of 
habit, three years, even one, will much affect 
expression. 

Two playmates separate : a few years pass, 
and a man walks into your room whose mouth, 
before he opens it, tells you by the dnes around 
it what dissipation in the foreign land has 
wrought inside the boy you used to play tag 
with; or else the strong lips of energy and self- 
control reveal their untold story of brave adven- 
ture. Not on the faces of the dead or wounded 
only did our war leave its mark : some returned 
with eyes hard and wild from war's rough 



24 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

usages, — others with eyes ennobled by a look 
that the years of peace and ease had never seen. 
Colonel Eobert Shaw, the hero of Fort Wagner, 
he who was buried in the trenches with his negro 
soldiers, left college with a gentle boyish face a 
year before the war broke out. After his death 
his northern home became a shrine of paintings 
and memorials. While I stood wondering at the 
altered features in pictures taken during the 
battle-years, his mother told me how swiftly, as 
the months of consecration sped, power added 
itself to the sweetness already in the lines. 

Rarely, the transfiguration dawns almost as we 
watch. Miss Martineau knew a school-boy ten 
years old, who once spent his whole Easter hol- 
idays in reading certain poems. " He came out 
of the process so changed," she says, "that none 
of his family could help being struck by it. The 
expression of his eye, the cast of his countenance, 
his use of words, his very gait, were changed. 
In ten days he had advanced years in intelli- 
gence." And often we have seen in children and 
in friends — in strangers, too — transfiguration 
flash, as " light that never was on sea or land " 
shot up the inward skies. There are three shin- 
ing faces in the Bible, those of Moses, Jesus, 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 25 

Stephen. " Moses wist not that his face shone." 
"Jesus was transfigured before them, and his 
face did shine as the sun." " Those who sat in 
the council, looking steadfastly on Stephen, saw 
his face as it had been the face of an angel." 
With or without a legend we can easily believe 
that the splendid vow each man had vowed lit 
up his face for a time with an unearthly light. 
To each of the three had come a call of God, and 
each had perfectly accepted his commission, come 
what might; and what was facing two of the 
three as consequence was plainly death. Such 
a faith and such a purpose to-day would light a 
face. Suppose one of us knew that this very 
week, "in some good cause not his own," he was 
to perish, if need be, and with simple gladness 
went on to meet that fate, thinking of the cause 
and not the consequence, — would not an illu- 
mined face tell the tale and make the people 
wonder what bright spirit had possession of 
their friend? 

Sooner or later happens on the face of most 
of us somewhat of that which happened on great 
Dante's face. Those haggard, rock-like features, 
known so well, it is supposed were copied from 
a mask made after death. But in 1840, under 



26 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

the white-washed wall of a Florence chapel, was 
discovered the bright, fresh face of the young 
Dante — almost Dante of the Vita Nuova and 
the living Beatrice, — painted there by his friend 
Giotto full six hundred years ago. Place the 
Dante of the death-mask and the Dante of 
Giotto's fresco side by side, and interpolate that 
life of disappointment, exile, persecution, despair 
about his country, love impossible to realize, and 
aspiration towards one pure ideal, — and the 
secret of the face-change is an open one. Over 
a smiling vineyard has flowed and stiffened the 
lava of fierce convulsions, till only the general 
conformation of the surface remains under the 
hard, black shroud. It is not always thus : some- 
times the process may reverse itself, the vineyard 
and the fruitage and the peace of God resting 
at the end on that which at life's beginning is 
unpromising enough. 

If prayer be wishing, it is right to pray for 
beauty, although the single prayer worth praying 
in this connection is that of Socrates, the ugly 
man: "Ye Gods, grant me to become beautiful 
in the inner man; and that whatever outward 
things I have may be in harmony with those 
within!" Was it Miss Breme^s prayer? A 



OF FACES AXD THEIR MAKING. 27 

friend asked her in her growing fame, " How do 
you feel now that so many persons come to see 
you ? n "I wish that I were handsomer," was 
the honest and womanly reply. All women wish 
that ; and all men wish all women to be beauti- 
ful. And since to have beauty is to have added 
privilege of blessing, it is right to be glad that 
one is beautiful, — glad with that kind of glad- 
ness in which thankfulness and humility and 
simplicity find room to nest. Chadwick is right ; 
it is possible to be — 

"Not proud because thou art so beautiful, — 
Not proud, but glad of heart 
To feel thy glorious beauty is a part 
Of all the beauty that is anywhere 
On land or sea or in the gleaming air ; 
Such gladness is less proud than dutiful." 

Only, to help your boy or girl bear well the 
gift, teach them with Robert Brownings lines 
to hold it as a trust: 

"Where is the use of the lips' red charm, 
The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow, 
And the blood that blues the inside arm, 
Unless we turn, as the soul knows how, 
The earthly gift to an end divine ?" 



Z5 OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

If you have ^beautiful good friend, then thank 
God twice! If no such friends, at least have 
great faces en your Trails. There are faces that 
in picture-silence act on us like battle-hymns and 
trumpet-calls, or like still waters and green fields. 
They inspire, they shame, they purify us to look 
at them. It is good to even hear or read of them. 
A vast truth struggles to expression in the Incar- 
nation doctrine. God, who is dim in rock, who 
dawns in flower and bird, when most himself — 
to sense like ours — becometh human flesh. In 
each other's eyes we therefore look most clearly 
into the eyes of God. " In thy face have I seen 
the Eternal/' said Bunsen, gazing up into his 
wife's eyes just before he died. I once showed 
a girl the picture of a rarely gifted boy-friend : 
"It makes me think of all the beautiful things 
I have ever seen," she said, — and I blessed the 
intuition that could see so quickly what I knew. 
The democrat looked in silence at John Brown's 
bust : " Well, he ought to have been hung ! " he 
said at last. " Why so ? " " Because he makes 
all the rest of us look so mean." Of Frederick 
Maurice it is said, "There was something so 
awful, and yet so Christ-like in his awful stern- 
ness, in the expression which came over that 



OF FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 29 

beautiful face when he heard of anything base 
or cruel or wicked, that it brought home to the 
by-standers our Lord's judgment of sin." The 
Christ-face in art never satisfies ; yet, such as it 
is, it sometimes is a gospel in itself, still draw- 
ing little children to his side. When Thorwald- 
sen had modeled his Christ in clay, he led a 
little child into the room to know if the features 
would tell their own story to the simple and 
untaught. "Who is that?" he asked. "It is 
our Saviour," was the prompt reply. In like 
manner the picture of Page's Christ was shown 
to a boy seven years old, without his being told 
its meaning. He gazed awhile intently on the 
face. " What do you think of it ? " one said. He 
replied with reverent simplicity, " 0, it is exactly 
like him ! " 

Some Quaker eyes are organized spirituality ; 
they bring heaven-thoughts to the simplest or the 
roughest. " The peace of God that passeth under- 
standing" translates itself through them. A 
young girl often met a certain old Quaker lady 
in the horse-cars. One day, acting on a sudden 
impulse, the girl turned and said, "Won't you 
let me kiss you ? " " Yes, dear, certainly." The 
friendship, thus beginning, ripened, and then the 



30 OF FACES ASTD THEIR MAkiXi; 

maiden, recalling this quaint first moment of it, 
asked, " Weren't you surprised that time in the 
horse-car, when I asked you to let me kiss you ? " 
" no, dear," was the answer, " they often ask 
me that." Have you never had yourself the 
beautiful surprises of the street, — met the man 
" who had the Ten Commandments written on his 
face " ; seen the face which Bacon speaks of, — 
" a face as of one who pities men " ; caught in a 
girl's fresh morning eyes, 

" The look of one who bears away- 
Glad tidings from the hills of day" ; 

or, best of all, upon some happy day beheld 

"A sweet attractive kinde of grace, 
A full assurance given by lookes, 
Continuall comfort in a face, 
The lineaments of Gospel bookes" ? 



" Her face was pinched and pale and thin, 
But splendor struck it from within ! " 

Splendor from within! It is the only thing 
which makes the real and lasting splendor with- 
out. Trust that inevitable law of self-expression. 



OF FACES AXD THEIR MAKTXG 31 

Be, not seem ! Be, to seem ! Be beautiful, and 
you soon will appear so to all who love you and 
beauty. "Within lies the robing-room ; it is the 
spirit's beauty that makes fair the face even for 
the evening's company. Illumination must begin 
in the soul, — the face catches glory only from 
that side. And spirit's beauty, that which the 
work and wear and pain of life do so much to 
render exquisite, is the only beauty that outlasts 
the work and wear and pain. Have you no 
friend of whom, if you ever think at all of the 
plainness of the poor, worn face, your next 
thought is, — " But your soul shines through 
already: what a beautiful angel you are going 
to make ! " 

To become ever more and more beautiful, — 
what a beautiful destiny ! May we not look for- 
ward to a time even on this earth, when, in a 
sense Paul hardly meant, " we shall all come to 
the perfect man, the measure of the stature of 
the fullness of Christ" ? The Jesus-face which 
haunts the painters with its even brows and 
grave sweet regard is but an ideal, a poet's dream 
of what ought to be. That, or something better 
yet, is what our far-off children may become. 
Think of the mornings in the distant generations 



32 OP FACES AND THEIR MAKING. 

when many men and women shall be as beautiful 
upon the streets as the fairest and the purest of 
to-day ; when the homes shall be full of gentle, 
noble faces, because the laws of living shall be 
known to be obeyed ; when a man's sickness, if 
self-acquired, shall be his shame ; and when to 
have a child will be holiness unto the Lord ! 
Our Whittier foretells that time : 

"A glory shines before me 
Of what mankind shall be — 
Pure, generous, brave and free ; 
A dream of man and woman, 
Diviner, but still human; 
Of richer life, where Beauty- 
Walks hand in hand with Duty." 

Our Emerson foretells it, — a time "when the 
Ought, when Duty, shall be one thing with Sci- 
ence, with Beauty, and with Joy." 




CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 



One boy and one girl can go to Harvard 
College or Wellesley, to Ann Arbor or 
Cornell, while a thousand boys and girls can- 
not go : let not the thousand think that culture 
ivithout college is impossible for them. It is 
well to always remember this ; and well, in con- 
nection, to say over to ourselves now and then 
certain homely old truths about education which 
we are apt to forget; old truths which those 
who go to school, and those who are through 
school, and those who hardly ever have had a 
chance for school, all equally need to bear in 
mind; homely truths which the schoolmasters 
and the school books comparatively little em- 
phasize, yet which are more important than 
anything which they do emphasize ; truths 
about the fundamental education, that which 
underlies all other education, and which all 



36 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

the rest is for, and which goes on independently 
of time and place, equally in school and out 
of it, equally in term-time and in vacation, 
equally in youth and in age. But this is the 
word to keep to the front: One girl and one 
boy can go to Harvard or Wellesley, while a 
thousand cannot : let not the thousand think 
that culture without college is impossible for 
them. 

Of the thousand, however, many may hurry 
to say, that they do not care for "culture," 
anyway. Yet " culture " is but a sort of glory- 
word for " education." There is a flower hint 
in " culture " that suggests not only the process 
of growing and unfolding, but the beauty of 
the blossom and the service of the fruit at 
last. When men laugh at it, their very mis- 
spelling — "culchur" — shows that what they 
laugh at is not the real thing, but some dwarf 
or caricature that apes the real thing. No one 
who is wise laughs at true culture. Everyone 
who is wise wants it. Everybody who is wise 
tries for it. Culture is that which turns the 
little, sour, wild crab-apple of the roadside into 
the apple of the orchard. Culture is that 
which turns the clumsy apprentice into the 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 37 

workman who honors his calling and is honor 
to it. Culture is that which transforms the 
wilful child of five years into the earnest boy 
of ten, the self -controlling man of twenty, the 
helper of men at thirty, the loved of men at 
fifty. Culture is that which takes a mind in 
its crab-apple, 'prentice, uncontrolled stage, 
and trains it into a steady power to see, to 
grasp, to retain, to compare, to judge, and 
to find the law in the fact. Nobody really 
laughs at this. The laugh comes in when this 
large, inspiring word is used for a varnish of 
make-believe wisdom, or when it is dwarfed 
to mean a bookish education only, or — 
dwarf of a dwarf — a mere text-bookish educa- 
tion, such as the high school and college are 
sometimes thought to give, and sometimes do 
give. 

Yet if to-day they give no more than that 
it is the fault of the boy and girl rather than 
of the school. Our colleges and high schools 
have much yet to learn, but no one knows 
this so well as themselves. The educators 
were never so wise as now in suspecting their 
own methods, and never more in earnest to 
find out better ones. By all means go to 



38 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

college, if you can; or if, when young, you 
could not go, give your boys and girls the 
chance you missed. That is an uncolleged 
parent's glory, — to give his child the educa- 
tion that he himself missed. Go to college, 
especially if you have to pinch in order to go 
and get through; for that pinch on the money 
side is apt to halve the dangers and double 
the profits of college. Go all the more for that. 
Go, because the college is a greenhouse for 
the mind, where its faculties can be started 
and trained more quickly than outside. But, 
after all, the great crops on which the country 
feeds are not started, still less do they grow, 
in the greenhouses; no more do the great 
faculties of mental and moral nature have 
vital need of college training. And, whether 
you go or not, keep two main facts in mind: 
this, first, that education chiefly depends on 
the boy, not on the place, even when the 
place is the best college in the land; and 
this, second, that in the boy or girl it depends 
more on the will power than the brain power. 
And what do these two facts hint but that 
culture can be won outside of a college by 
means which nearly all of us can master? 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 39 

So I repeat it again: while one boy and one 
girl can go to Harvard or Wellesley, and a 
thousand cannot, let not the thousand think 
that culture without college is impossible. 



(Situation lies mainlg in £fjree Groups 
of $ afrits* 

Eather let each one of the thousand think 
just the reverse, and think often, — culture 
without college is possible, and possible for 
me! Keep that motto bright on the mind's 
inner wall. It is possible, because the main 
of education lies in self -disciplines, — self- 
disciplines in certain habits that are the 
tap-roots of both mind and character. Parents, 
teachers, friends, employers, home, school, 
workshop, travel, never make one grow : they 
only offer us materials for growth. " Each for 
himself" is the inevitable law of the actual 
growing. No one can assimilate the materials 
and make mind from them except one's self, 
just as no one can digest another's dinner 
for him. Education is always at bottom a 
self-discipline ; and all of us, to speak exactly, 
are " self-made" or self-grown men. What 



40 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

is more, these tap-root habits lie at the bottom 
of everybody's culture, and are the same for 
all. College men and uncolleged need them 
alike. Eich men and poor men need them 
alike. Talent and genius need them as much 
as the ordinary mind. 

What are they, these tap-root habits ? They 
lie in three groups. First, and underlying all, 
those habits by which we adjust the powers 
within us to each other, — self-control and 
temperance, courage to bear, courage to dare, 
concentration, energy, perseverance. Do you 
call these mental, or do you call them moral, 
habits ? Practically, they are both. They 
make the tap-root of both mind and character. 
It is they that compact the man into a unit, 
into a "person." And without them high 
success in any life-path is impossible. One 
cannot go far in book-knowledge without them, 
cannot go far on in his trade without them, — 
of course, cannot rise far toward nobleness 
without them. Without them the average 
man dooms himself to remain all his life a 
half-failure. Without them talent is lop- 
sidedness and genius top-heaviness, — sources 
of downfall rather than of rise. But with 



CULTURE Yv r ITHOUT COLLEGE. 41 

them, whether one be dull or talented, every 
year of life sees growth, advance, uprise. 

Next, another group, — those habits by which 
we adjust ourselves to other people, — habits 
of justice, of sympathy, of modesty, of courtesy, 
and of the public spirit which begins in self- 
forgetting for those we love and widens into 
self-forgetting for all whom we can help. 
And, besides these two, a third group, — those 
habits by which we adjust ourselves to our 
ideals, habits of loyalty to truth as truth, of 
delight in beauty as beauty, of reverence for 
goodness as goodness. In this last group we 
reach conscious religion. 

As we name these great names one by one, 
the feeling rises in us, — these surely are the 
main things in culture : to have these habits 
is to have -vigorous mind, firm character, high 
tastes. Specialties of knowledge and of art 
are good, but these are worth more than any 
specialty the college can give. Think them 
over once again, these man and woman-making 
habits, — the power of self-control, the power 
to dare and to bear, the power to face obstacles, 
to stand firm and to push hard; the splendid 
power of centering one's whole mind in fixed 



42 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

acts of attention ; the power to side instinctively 
with right against the wrong, to side with the 
weak against the strong, to side with public 
against private ends; the power to love the 
perfect, and to obey with answering joy a call 
to come up higher. This, this is the real 
"culture." And he who strengthens these 
powers in himself is a well-educated man. 
Now all these noble powers can be attained 
without high school or college. Then culture 
without college is possible, and possible for me. 

Wt}t £fjree STearijers: (I) <®nz y z OTorfu 

Who are the teachers that teach these things 
to us, — us who cannot go to Harvard or 
Cornell ? The chief teachers, also, are three, — 
Work, Society, Books ; and the greatest of the 
three is one's work. To our work we owe 
more education than to anything else in life, 
spite of the hard names we sometimes give 
it. Work makes mind ; work makes character. 
No work, no culture. It matters less than we 
are apt to think what the work is, so that it 
be hard enough to require will, attention and 
honor to do it. Of all the educating forces, 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 43 

a steady need to do something promptly, 
persistently, accurately, and as well as we can, 
stands paramount, because nothing else so 
vitalizes those primary roots of mind and 
character, — the habits that came first upon 
our list. "Every man's task is his life- 
preserver," Emerson reminds us : he means our 
souFs life. The workless people are the 
worthless people, even to themselves. What 
wealth gives, or should give, is choice of work, 
never exemption from it. A man born rich is 
born into danger. He, as also the man quick 
to win riches, must make himself trustee for 
causes not his own, or else his riches become 
his doom. In our land, at least, a " gentleman," 
whatever else he is, must be a good workman ; 
that is, one who has something to do, who can 
do it well, and who always does it well. 
To-day the daughter, also, of wealth elects a 
task to save her soul's life. To be an 
" educated" woman, she has to have capacity 
to do well some good work or other, and to 
be a true woman, she has to stand for that 
capacity exercised, for good work well done. 

Well done ; for, if our work is to teach us, 
it must be good work, — good as we can do. 



44 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

The culture in it is proportioned to the 
quality of it, — not the absolute quality, but 
the quality as proportioned to our power. 
And good work means, first or last, and 
often both first and last, hard work. The 
master-workmen in any trade or profession 
have always been hard workmen. The actor 
Kean was a master on the stage : it is said 
that he practised two days on a single line; 
but, when he spoke the five words, they 
melted the house to tears. Hard work did 
that. Euskin is a master in the art of 
making sentences. He tells us he has often 
spent several hours in perfecting a single 
period. Hard work, again. Edward Everett 
Hale is a master in the art of writing short 
stories. To write the well-known story, "In 
His Name," he took a journey in Europe, 
ransacked a Lyons bookshop for old pamphlets, 
studied the history of poisoning, shut himself 
up a week or two in a country house, and 
then, says he, "I was ready to go to work." 
George Eliot was a mistress in the art of 
writing a long story. She spent six weeks 
in Florence before beginning "Boniola," in 
order to catch the trick of language among 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 45 

the common people of the city; and her 
husband said that, before writing " Daniel 
Deronda," she read a thousand books on Jewish 
history. Hard work, that; and she was a 
genius, too ! Darwin was a master-workman 
in science. In his scrap of autobiography he 
explains the success of his book, "The Origin 
of Species," by two causes : (1) It was so 
slowly written. More than twenty years of 
collection and arrangement of facts preceded 
its publication, and that publication was his 
fifth rewriting. First came a short, condensed 
statement, then another, then a long, full 
statement, then an abstract from this, and at 
last, abstracted from this abstract, came the 
book. What patient labor! Yet Darwin was 
a man before whose genius all the men of 
science in the world stand in reverence. And 
(2) for years it was his "golden rule/' as he 
calls it, to note and study every fact that 
seemed opposed to his theory. The result of 
this rule was that his book, when it appeared, 
was a sifted argument presented at its strongest, 
anticipating most of the objections that were 
raised to it. Hard work, all this, as he himself 
knew well; for it was himself who said: 



46 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

" Whenever I have found out that I have 
blundered, and when I have been contempt- 
uously criticised, and even when I have been 
over-praised, it has been my greatest comfort 
to say to myself, ( I have worked as hard and 
as well as I could, and no man can do more 
than this.'" 

Such instances hint how master-workmen 
educate themselves by and in their work to 
be the masters. And if this be true in book- 
making, it is no less true of any humbler 
task. Have you read what Mrs. Garfield once 
wrote to her husband, the man who was to 
be President ? "I am glad to tell you that, 
out of all the toil and disappointments of the 
summer just ended, I have risen up to a 
victory. I read something like this the other 
day: ' There is no healthy thought without 
labor, and thought makes the labor happy.' 
Perhaps this is the way I have been able to 
climb up higher. It came to me one morning 
when I was making bread. I said to myself: 
'Here I am, compelled by an inevitable 
necessity to make our bread this summer. 
Why not consider it a pleasant occupation, 
and make it so by trying to see what perfect 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 47 

bread I can make ? ' It seemed like an inspira- 
tion, and the whole of life grew brighter. 
The very sunshine seemed flowing down 
through my spirit into the white loaves; and 
now I believe my table is furnished with 
better bread than ever before. And this 
truth, old as creation, seems just now to have 
become fully mine, — that I need not be the 
shirking slave of toil, but its regal master, 
making whatever I do yield its best fruits." 

It is a great comfort and inspiration amid 
long, hard tasks to remember all this, and to 
say to one's self: "Why, this is a going-to- 
college for me : and this particular task is the 
day's lesson. I am not a drudge, but a pupil : 
let me do this thing as well as I can, and 
there is education, i culture,' in it for me." 
The sense of quantity that lies in the task 
may tire and age us, — it often does : the 
sense of high quality put into the task 
refreshes and makes us young. Many of us 
contrive to miss the joy by not doing the 
work well enough to secure it. 



4S CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

(2) Soctetg. 

The second teacher for those of us who 
cannot go to college is Society. And, as with 
the head teacher, Work, we scarcely realize 
how much we owe this tireless assistant, and 
how much more it can teach than it does, if 
we will let it. Probably no eye meets eye, 
no hand clasps hand, no two voices mingle in 
a minute's conversation without some actual 
interchange of influence, unconscious, if not 
conscious. Think, then, of the education 
always going on for good or for ill! A 
wilderness of varied character stretches around 
us in every social circle. The heroes and the 
villains of the novels walk our streets, and 
we ourselves are the stuff that Shakspere's 
plays are made of. The carpenter and the 
carpentress, the grocer and the grocer's wife, 
the parson and the lawyer, and the broods of 
playing children, hold more texts than any 
text-book. These are the novels and plays 
and text-books alive: books are men and 
women potted and canned, as it were. If we 
can only read well these neighbors of ours, 
each, like a bit of Scripture, is " profitable 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 49 

for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for 
instruction in righteousness ".; and the best 
among them are "inspired of God" to reveal 
to us — what ? Ourselves, our own unknown 
possibilities, the sleeping powers within us, — 
and to make us come up higher. "Our chief 
want in life, — is it not somebody who can 
make us do what we can? We are easily 
great with the loved and honored associate." 
As if unexplored wastes of human nature lay 
within us, waiting for some Livingston or 
Kane to come that way. The opening of 
Africa's heart dates from a Livingston's 
advent; so a capacity in us may date from a 
definite meeting or conversation with some 
fellow-man. 

The more persons we really can "meet," 
then, the better for us. "With an individual 
as with a town or a nation, civilization is pro- 
portioned to inter-communication. How many 
do we touch ? How large is our social horizon ? 
"'Every man my schoolmaster" is a motto for 
wise men, and a motto that makes one a wise 
man. Of Daniel Webster it was said that he 
never met a stable-boy without extracting 
from him some bit of information that was 



50 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

worth, remembering. If "here is a person 
with some message for me" be the feeling 
with which, we are wont to meet strangers, 
the result in four years may be worth one 
year of a college, — so great is the daily income 
of such a man's mind as compared with, that 
of one who instinctively shuts himself up to 
a stranger. 

Among men thus trained and enriched are 
those we put on the school committee, send 
to the legislature, elect to be Mayor and 
Governor and possibly President, — or make 
Overseer of the very college that, as boys, 
they longed, but could not afford, to go to. 
Possibly President : the sum of Lincoln's whole 
schooling was hardly one year, but Lincoln 
knew men. And three or four others of our 
Presidents were also log-cabin boys. And 
should we ask them about their schooling, 
these leaders might answer: "My schooling? 
I have had none to speak of. My schoolmasters 
have been the men and women I have met in 
parlors, in the church, in the caucus, in the 
shop, the counting-rooms, on 'change. One 
taught me manners: one taught me tact. She 
raised my standards of justice and truthfulness 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 51 

and honor: he widened my ideas of public 
spirit. This one showed me how to save time 
in my work, and that one how to spend my 
leisure to advantage; and many a man and 
many a woman has served to warn me by 
making my mistakes for me. I have seldom 
long faced a neighbor without facing a teacher." 
He who can say such things was born for 
an education, and will get it, whether he go 
to a college or not. 

But to get it, this profit from persons, one 
must really meet them, — meet, and not merely 
encounter, — meet them, and not merely their 
outside. How is it these head-scholars, in 
the school without books, manage to extract so 
much from others ? Some by a gift of eyes 
to see to the inside of a neighbor. Others 
by a genius for geniality, — that is, letting 
others cordially into the inside of one's self. 
But as in work, so in society, few win a 
great success without conscious, deliberate aim. 
Genius helps greatly, but even for genius there 
is no royal road to an art, — and this is a 
fine art, to extract a good education out of 
society. It takes bravery, modesty, sympathy 
and high choices. Bravery to conquer shyness, 



52 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

if one has it. For some poor fellows it takes 
campaigns of suffering to conquer shyness. If 
we are shy, we had better launch ourselves 
into the party, though we drift to the wall 
forlorn; better send ourselves to the dancing- 
school, though we only dare to dance with the 
little girls; better join a conversation-club 
and talk, though we hear our heart thump 
when we try; better make ourselves tell the 
story at table, until we can tell it, and others 
can hear it, without a shudder. By and by we 
shall hug and bless ourselves for this bravery. 
But through it all keep the holy spirit of 
shyness — modesty ; for modesty gives the 
passport to the doors of the better and best 
in society. The clean, kind heart is needed, 
too; for this admits one past the mere doors, 
and past the reception-rooms of courtesy, to 
the inner living-rooms of mind and heart. 
And still the high choice is needed which 
habitually seeks and companions the best side 
of a man, and which instinctively tries to 
make friends among those brighter and nobler 
than one's self. Four things, — it takes them 
all; bravery, modesty, sympathy, and high 
choices in comradeship. Have these, and you 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 53 

will have the fine art of making neighbors, 
and of making your way quickly to the best 
in a neighbor. And men and women in loving 
faculties of approval will confer on you an 
invisible degree, " Master of Hearts," — as 
honorable as any the colleges give. 



(3) Books. 

And now a word about the third teacher 
who waits to teach us boys and girls and 
men and women who cannot go to college. 
His name is Books. He is the same great 
teacher that they have in colleges ; but in 
this day he goes about the country, teaching 
everybody. He goes to the big city and every 
alley in it, teaching. He goes to the little 
village and every cottage in it, teaching. He 
will teach just what one wishes to hear, — all 
manner of trash, all manner of vileness, if one 
wants that. He does teach a vast deal of 
mental dissipation, and leads many minds into 
very bad company. On the other hand, there 
is no end to the good things he will teach, if 
one wants them. He will teach us history. 
He will teach us science. He will teach u§ 



54 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

the love of noble literature. He will teach 
us how to think well, how to talk well, how 
to write well. And he will stand to us in 
place of good society, if we cannot otherwise 
command it; for in books we can visit in 
impersonal fashion the best of the race. He 
will almost bring the college to us who cannot 
go to it, if we are willing to study under 
him patiently and steadily and with high aims. 
But once more, it takes the patience, the 
steadiness, the high choices, and the hard work, 
or else he can do little for us. The young 
man ready to pay that price for his help will 
make for himself three Golden rules: — 

I will be a reader; 

I will read best books; 

I will read best books in the best way. 

" I will be a reader " : that means, no day 
shall make me so tired that I will not find 
an hour, — if not an hour, a half -hour; if not 
a half, then a quarter; if not a quarter, then 
five minutes — in which I will read something. 
With many of us the odd minutes of ten 
years are enough to make the difference 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. DO 

between an educated and an uneducated man. 
The odd minutes of one winter or summer can 
make the difference between two good solid 
books taken into us and none at all taken in. 
The odd minutes of to-morrow can make the 
difference between a rich day and a poor day 
for our minds. The men on exchange grow 
rich on " margins w : it is margins of time well 
used that give us mental riches. How many 
opulent minds have ta,ught that secret ! There 
were Franklin, Theodore Parker, Lincoln, — all 
of them poor boys with horny hands and 
candlelight, no more; there were Faraday, 
Chambers, Stephenson. Many and many a 
boy starting with good eyes, a fair mind, a 
strong will, and his odd minutes, has become 
an intellectual capitalist. Many a boy, — and 
how about girls ? Let me quote from Far 
and Near, a journal for working-girls: — 

"A young mother said : ' I haven't read a 
book in three months. I can't with the 
children.' But her neighbor across the way, 
with one more child, had read many volumes 
in that time by always keeping a book in her 
work-basket, ready to catch up at odd minutes. 
She seasoned her darning and mending with 



56 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

literature. Lucy Larcom, when a mill-girl in 
Lowell, carried a book in the big pocket of 
her apron, and records specially the fact that 
she read Wordsworth's poems and many of 
Shakspere's plays in spare minutes amid the 
clatter of spindles. Another lady told the 
writer that she read Carlyle's i French Revolu- 
tion 5 and Taine's i English Literature 9 while 
waiting for her husband to come to dinner. 
She was her own housemaid, and kept the 
books close at hand in the dining-room." 

But, of course, if I am to reach culture, 
the books that I read must be "best books" — 
not bad, not even pretty good, but the best 
my mind is able to absorb. That is our 
second Golden Rule. In this happy day of 
cheap literature beware of the literature of 
cheap quality. Each age begets out of its 
very civilization its own new temptation, some 
new form of dissipation. The saloon at the 
corner is only about two hundred years old. 
The newspaper on the table in every home is 
hardly fifty years old ; but the " newspaper 
habit " has already become a direful dissipation 
for many of us, — partly because the papers 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 57 

are so good. We could not live without them ; 
but their toothsome scrappiness, taken as 
mental "square meals," bewilders attention, 
shallows the judgment, fritters the memory, 
steals the growing-time. It is the " newspaper 
habit" that does the harm. Too much news- 
paper will spoil one for magazines. Too much 
magazine will spoil one for a solid book. Our 
margins are small. How shall we use them ? 
It is easy to use them all up, and have 
nothing to show. Look out the words "Index 
Expurgatorius " in the cyclopaedia to see what 
they mean, and then make a private Index 
Expurgatorius, on which a great many innocent 
books as well as all bad books shall be 
registered, — innocent books which are not 
innocent for you and for me, because our 
time-margins are small. If I am a boy, 
the question on which my education is apt 
to turn is this : Shall the newspaper be 
the staple of my reading ? If I am a girl, 
the turning-question is : Shall love-stories be 
the staple of my reading ? Am I a grown 
man or woman, the turning, or perhaps the 
turned, question is, What sort of books lie 
waiting on my table for the leisure hour at 



58 CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 

night, and what do I read on Sunday 
afternoons ? In our public libraries seventy 
to eighty-five per cent, of the books taken 
out are classed as "juveniles and fictions." If 
my library book is often in that seventy per 
cent., one thing is sure, — I am no candidate 
for "culture." Whereas the habit of absorbing 
three or four "real" books each year, and 
year by year, goes far in ten years toward 
making the gentleman, making the lady. 

Of absorbing them, I say; for "I will read 
best books in the best way." This, our last 
rule, can be put in one word, — read and 
ruminate ! Read and ruminate ! A book that 
gives no cud to chew is scarcely worth 
reading once; a book worth reading, of which 
one does not chew the cud, has scarcely been 
read. 

To end, let us lay up in mind a bracing 
word from John Stuart Mill : " They who 
know how to employ opportunities will often 
find that they can create them, and what we 
achieve depends less on the amount of time 
we possess than on the use we make of our 



CULTURE WITHOUT COLLEGE. 59 

time. Several great things which this genera- 
tion is destined to do will assuredly be done 
by persons for whom society has done far less, 
to whom it has given far less preparation, than 
those whom I am now addressing." If that 
be true in England, how much more true here 
in the Land of Opportunity! Work, Society, 
Books, — with these three teachers, and a will 
to get the best from them, culture without 
college is possible, and possible for me. 




THE THORN-BEARER. 



THE THORN-BEARER. 



It is nothing exceptional to have a thorn in the 
flesh, — a chronic bodily infirmity; it is not 
even exceptional to use it as an element of self- 
transfiguration. It is exceptional to use it thus 
as successfully as Paul used his. 

To know what Paul did in spite of his thorn 
and with his thorn, begin at the middle of the 
eleventh chapter of his second letter to the 
Corinthians, and read to the middle of the twelfth 
chapter; then turn back to chapter four, and 
beginning at " We are troubled," read to its end. 
It must have been a most inspiriting thing to 
meet Paul of Tarsus, and spend a half -day with 
him while he patched at tents, — something to 
remember all one's after-life. What stories he 
could tell, that man of four shipwrecks, eight 



64 THE THORN-BEARER. 

floggings, and one stoning ! What does a man 
think of, when floating a day and a night in the 
sea ? He could have told us. How does a man 
feel in the hands of a mob ? He knew, if he had 
not forgotten such a ripple as a mob. What 
were his favorite hymns in prisons? He had 
a list in his heart. But if we had asked him 
which of all his pains and perils was worst, I 
fancy a quiet smile would have grown on his 
face as he answered, "My life-companion, my 
thorn in the flesh, is the worst, — and yet is 
the best!" 

It is worth while trying to think what such an 
answer would mean. Worth while, because to 
many of us the years are apt to bring the thorn, 
even if no accident, and no bequest at birth, 
have brought it early. Now the thorn is blind- 
ness ; now it is deafness ; now it is the lameness 
of a limb; now the wear-out of some internal 
organ. As many senses and as many organs 
as the healthful body has, so many possibilities 
of thorn-growths in us, — that is, of permanent 
mal-growths, chronic cripplings. What does it 
mean to say of such a thing, " The worst, and 
yet the best"? To say with Paul, "I take 
pleasure in it ; for when I am weak, then am I 



THE THORN-BEARER. 65 

strong " ? How can one rise from a catalogue, 
"Thrice was I beaten," etc., up to that chant, 
" Troubled on every side, yet not distressed " ? 
Or, rather, not how to get from the catalogue to 
the chant, but how to feel like singing the very 
catalogue as part of the chant ! Paul of Tarsus 
is not here to tell, but every village has its Pauls 
and Paulines, two or three ; and one has perhaps 
his own smaller, blunter thorn to help explain — 
like a sort of half-breed interpreter — their 
experience. As we watch and listen, and try 
to interpret, something like this seems to be 
the philosophy of thorn-bearing: — 

(1) Pace the fate ! Accept it as fate, as Mar- 
garet Puller did " the universe/' — something to 
be neither dodged nor ignored. Do not play 
mock-metaphysics with it : " Matter is not ; body 
is not ; crippling, pain and disease are not." It 
is not the bravest philosophy, that, though its 
followers are often so brave. Try Paul's philos- 
ophy, rather, which calls a thorn, thorn. Eather 
from Browning learn, — 

u Let us not always say, 

4 Spite of this flesh to-day 

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! ' 



66 THE THORN-BEARER. 

As the bird wings and sings, 
Let us cry, 'All good things 

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh 
helps soul I * " 

If the thorn can be ignored, or if one is still hop- 
ing, praying (as Paul tells us he did " thrice") 
that it may depart, it is not yet the full-grown 
thorn,—- the blindness which is to darken all the 
years, the deafness which is to be life's growing 
silence, the lameness which is to make the third 
limb always necessary. Face the fate, without 
sentimentalizing about it. Say rather, This thing 
is to cripple me always, everywhere; it is my 
life's condition, — part of my universe. Say this, 
and instantly it begins to grow easier to bear. 
The struggle against it is over, and what remains 
is simply to struggle against the hinder it imposes, 
and as far as one can to turn hinder to help. 
Fate is often not so hard to bear as things curable. 
The thing curable is an enemy until it be cured ; 
the thing incurable is a companion, and the sole 
question is how to make it a pleasant one. 

(2) Then one learns the difference between 
acceptance and. surrender, between becoming a 
subject and becoming a victim. The thorn is in 



THE THORN-BEARER. 67 

the flesh, — it is for me to say, It shall stay thorn 
of my fles h, and never become thorn of my mind. 
It shall not conquer me as well as my body. If 
it be my Eome, I will be its Greece, conquering 
in the spirit the brute force that masters me in 
the body. What Paul, infirm and of base pres- 
ence, did ; what Epictetus, old, lame, and a slave, 
did (read one book of his, or but his first chap- 
ter) ; what Eawcett, England's blind postmaster, 
did, — what many and many a glorious company 
of cripples have done, — that can I do, and that 
I will! This cramping life-companion I will 
somehow tame into an ally, make my friend 
and my benefactor. 

(3) The blind man, deaf man, lame man, say- 
ing this, soon learns that there are helps awaiting 
him ; especially that people, as a rule, are very 
kind to a cheerful cripple, — and not from pity 
only, but from admiration. Even if they are 
not brave, there is a great deal of delicate allow- 
ance made for thorn-bearers. We shall have to 
travel far to find the circle which does not appear 
to best advantage around its lamer members. 
Little acts of tenderness and grace spring up 
about them. For them the elbow of competition 



68 THE THORN-BEARER. 

turns into the offered hand of co-operation. Each 
one who is thorned is " a little fellow " to the 
unthorned ones, and the world is beginning to be 
a pretty good world for its little fellows. But 
much more than this is true, if the thorn-bearer 
be a hero in his bearing. To hardly any kind of 
heroism does the world give readier recognition, 
heartier admiration, than to his. A man must 
have conquered something to be a hero ; if the 
something be simply other men, we give him 
shoulder-straps, a statue in the public square, 
and write " General " before his name; if the 
something be a man's self, his own crippling or 
his own sin, we set the thought of him among 
the ideals in the heart, and begin to call him 
"Saint" 

(4) More and more this fact, that heroism of 
the rarer sort is open to us thorn-bearers, dawns 
over us, bringing happy visions. Here is a career 
then, not merely in spite of, but actually in vir- 
tue of, our crippling. If much be cut off from 
us, here is something added, — an Order of Nobil- 
ity into which cripples alone can enter. Nor can 
we fail to feel that success here is not only true 
success, and accredited by the world as true sue- 



THE THORN-BEARER. 69 

cess, but that it is thanked for by the world as 
high service rendered to it. For, sooner or later, 
all must take their turn and bear ; and we, the 
chronic cripples, who have learned the art of 
bearing well, can strengthen those strong com- 
rades when, for an hour, they need help sorely. 
What joy so great to a humble soul as the hope 
of rendering, after all, unexpected and high ser- 
vice ? Together with this joy comes another, — 
the joy of entering a noble fellowship. This 
deprivation, this suffering of mine, if borne well, 
puts me in the muster-roll with Paul himself and 
" all the martyrs ' noble host." That chronicle 
of his, " Five times received I forty stripes save 
one," and so on, begins to read like some ancestral 
record of our own house, or a page from the story 
of " our regiment," — old bravery making brave 
new battlefields forever. In such fellowship the 
Bible meanings deepen to us : "Always bearing 
about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the 
living of Jesus may also be made manifest in our 
body." In ours; why not? And Jesus' own 
word about yoke-bearing, " Take my yoke upon 
you and learn of me," — did it mean a yoke like 
his own ? Did he wear one himself ? 



70 THE THORN-BEARER. 

(5) Gradually, while trying to be less unde- 
serving of companionship like this, we realize 
that it is growing easier for us to " live in the 
spirit " than it used to be before the crippling 
came. We can hardly help the inference that 
perhaps it is easier for us than for those who 
know no thorn. The reason, of course, is that 
we are living more in the spirit in thus utilizing 
the thorn in our flesh. " The inward man renew- 
ing itself as the outward man perishes"; " When 
I am weak, then am I strong." He was right ; 
he was right! And to learn through our own 
experience that what Paul meant is true is to be 
making one's home in places where the Beatitudes 
and chapters like the fourth of Second Corin- 
thians were born in the old times, — and are still 
being born in the new. 



(6) One thing more is ours : it is easier now, 
than before the thorn came, to sympathize with 
all humbled souls, all the hindered, all strivers- 
and-failers, all those who are bearing pain and 
loss, — and so, first or last, easier to sympathize 
with all men. If brave thorn-bearing makes the 
brave our brothers, still more it makes us brothers 
to all who are not brave. It is almost impossible 



THE THORN-BEARER. 71 

to feel the prick of our own pain and be super- 
cilious, or indifferent, or unwilling to forgive a 
fellow-cripple. 

This must be some part, at least, of the mean- 
ing that lies within Paul's answer, that, of all his 
pains and perils, the thorn in his flesh, his life- 
companion, was the worst and yet was the best. 
Certainly the chemistry whose working in us is 
thus hinted owes its laws to Life larger than our 
own, even to that One Great Life which lives as 
strength and grace through all our trying and 
bearing and doing. So he called it well, " God's 
grace sufficient for me," " His strength made per- 
fect in my weakness." 

Into the Order of the Thorn only those whose 
pain is in themselves are privileged to enter. 
There is one Order of Nobility yet higher, and 
only one ; but into this other all who will can 
enter. The brotherhood whose symbol is the 
Cross, and whose pain begins not in themselves, 
but in others, outranks the brotherhood whose 
symbol is the Thorn. 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

OTitfj &ut!j0rities* 



What sound so lovable in all the symphonies 
as a child's laughter, — unconscious music 
improvised on the instant to fit the freshening 
fun ! Who taught the child that music ? Who- 
ever taught the stream its ripple, the sea its 
sparkle, the wind its whisper, the forest its harp. 
" God filleth thy mouth with laughter." Job in his 
ashes, heart-stunned but brave, must have thought 
it queer in Bildad the Shuhite to say that to a 
friend in his particular circumstances ; but, how- 
ever ill-timed, it was a large true word, — " God fill- 
eth thy mouth with laughter." The physicists tell 
us that a laugh is the unspent nervous energy in us, 
headed off in its wonted flow by a sudden percep- 
tion of incongruity — the long way of spelling 
"joke," — and seeking escape through the easiest 



76 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

channels ; in the higher vertebrates finding such 
channels through the muscles of the throat, lips 
and eyes. Hence the children, abounding in 
energy, with their thought-channels imperfectly 
opened, laugh oftener and louder than the think- 
ing and sobering elders ; and the jump and dance 
and toss of the arms are parts of the child's laugh, 
additional vents, — just as the dog, who smiles 
with his tail, adds its wag to the laugh at the other 
end of him. So with the laugh of the sea ; that 
multitudinous sparkle is an escape — the light 
not absorbed by the water becoming a rapture 
of face. The flower's color-laughter — Words- 
worth's poetry being unconscious science — is the 
light, not absorbed by its tissue, utilized for the 
beauty of petals. There is science as well as 
poetry in calling Beauty the smile, and Music the 
laughter, of Nature. Of Nature, — it is "God" 
who filleth the world as the mouth, and the mouth 
as the world, with laughing. 

This much concerning its origin, with Bildad 
and Herbert Spencer interpreting ; but no need 
of either to tell a laugh's meaning. It is simply 
the sign on the face of a good time in the spirit. 
It is the heart's spontaneous witness " how beau- 
tiful it is to be alive." Nothing seems quite so 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 77 

contagious. How it blesses the street, a face 
laughing all to itself! As soon as one sees it, 
the corners of his mouth begin to twitch, too, with 
the God's gift. Eyes light, strangers greet know- 
ingly, hearts soften, spirits rise, lives brighten, 
and the world grows friendly, within the circle 
of the merry echo. Educate your laugh if you 
can, to ring often and sweet, that you may be able 
to radiate widely your pleasure and health. If 
we may judge by the abundance of the glad sound, 
and its rapid radiation around every source of it, 
a good time must be part of the established suc- 
cess of Providence. 

Yet the first thing to be said about a good time 
is that the rule, " Seek and ye shall find," does not 
apply to it. Seek it and ye shall probably not 
find. Almost as little is it a thing — like Niag- 
ara — to start for with a through ticket : do that 
and ye shall hardly arrive. It is, in the main, 
what the roadside beauty is to the traveler, — 
with him on the way and all of the way, if he 
have the open eye and the open heart. But as, 
on the high-road, it is not the road so much as the 
eye that determines how much beauty is seen, so 
on the life-road it is not what circumstance is in 



78 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

relation to us, so much as what we are in relation 
to circumstance, that decides the amount of good 
time we shall have on the journey. The thing, 
then, to " seek " is, not the good time, but the 
spirit which can make good times out of common 
time, — the spirit of Good Cheer. The spirit of 
Good Cheer, — that is the spring in the hills 
whence laughter runs. 

That, if sought, can be found. And not only 
be found, but enlarged, if we will. In the Alps 
there are guides — and guides ; and the best are 
in constant demand. Who make the best guides 
to the Springs of Good Cheer ? Is it strange it 
should be the ackers ? One of the notable qual- 
ities of invalids, cripples and slaves is apt to be 
their abundance of cheer, while one of the notable 
things about many of us with valid bodies and 
happy homes, good friends and comforts galore, 
is apt to be the feebleness and intermission of 
cheer. If we pick out in mind that one of our 
friends who most suggests the term cheer-/^, 
the thought of many will probably light on some 
suffering child, or some plain-faced woman walk- 
ing poor and alone through life, or some hard- 
working mother moving with a huddle of children 
and cares through the world, or some small- 



A ItECIPE FOR GOOD CHEEK. 79 

brained, large-souled man who lias helped to 
carry the banner of a good cause for twenty years 
through poverty and ridicule. I knew a dear 
wraith of a woman whose family learnt to know 
when the pain of the night had been specially 
hard by the extra supply of humor and quip 
which she brought to the breakfast table. It was 
a washerwoman who said, " The more trouble, the 
more lion ; that's my principle ! " Here is a news- 
paper story — one of the blessed bits with which 
the better papers take pains to grace their chron- 
icles of tragedy and crime : " Old Margery Eagan 
died in a Detroit hospital a few years ago, aged 
one hundred and two. She had lived so long that 
her relatives had lost sight of her, and she ended 
her days as a pensioner of the Little Sisters of 
the Poor. But never for one of the days did she 
droop or lose spirits. Happy as the hours were 
long, she used to sing and tell stories, and even 
dance for the disheartened people around her. 
Every day the old lady would stroll through the 
infirmary to cheer up the young people there 
with her wit and breezy laughter. The smile on 
her withered old face was as sweet as that of a 
girl of sixteen. As a last resort to bring back to 
wan cheeks the flush of excitement and to dull 



80 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

eyes the light of happier days, she would take 
out her jewsharp and play the jigs and strathpeys 
she had learned in her childhood. Her fun was 
of that bubbling, infectious quality that does good 
like a medicine." Nothing was able to wrest 
from her her right to be happy in every vicissitude. 
If the story be true, in that hospital yard there 
ought to be a monument erected to her as " Old 
Margery, the Spirit of Laughter and the Discov- 
erer of the Fun-Cure." It might be ducats to the 
hospital, too, and extend the Margery system of 
therapeutics. Our little and lovable Marshall P. 
Wilder, who must be a cousin of hers, has just 
told us, since Mr. Vanderbilt's death, how the 
millionaire secretly employed him to visit the 
New York hospitals and asylums to administer 
laughter as the doctors administer doses. 

And here is another story I owe to the papers. 
This time it was an old negro auntie, found in a 
New York garret. She had been a slave set free 
by the war, who had somehow found her way to 
that corner of the great northern city. A city 
missionary, stumbling through the dirt of a dark 
entry, heard a voice say, " Who's there, Honey ? " 
Striking a match, he caught a vision of earthly 
want and suffering, of saintly trust and peace, 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 81 

" cut in ebony/' — calm, appealing eyes set amid 
the wrinkles of a pinched black face that lay on 
a tattered bed. It was a bitter night in February, 
and she had no fire, no fuel, no light. She had 
had no supper, no dinner, no breakfast. She 
seemed to have nothing at all but rheumatism 
and faith in God. One could not well be more 
completely exiled from all pleasantness of cir- 
cumstance. Yet the favorite song of this old 
creature ran : 

"Nobody knows de trouble I see, 
Nobody knows but Jesus; 
Nobody knows de trouble I see, — 
Sing Glory Hallelu ! 

" Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down, 
Sometimes I'm level with the groun', 
Sometimes the glory shines aroun', — 
Sing Glory Hallelu ! 

And so it went on : " Nobody knows de work 
I does/' "Nobody knows de griefs I has," the 
constant refrain being the u Glory Hallelu!" 
until the last verse rose : 

" Nobody knows de joys I has, 
Nobody knows but Jesus ! " 



82 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

" Troubled on every side, yet not distressed ; 
perplexed, but not in despair ; persecuted, but not 
forsaken ; cast down, but not destroyed " : it takes 
great Bible words to tell the cheer of that old 
negro auntie. 

Do you remember the little man who wrote 
those words, — a little man, I suppose, for he was 
" of weak presence," and little men are so often 
the ones who help the sun to rise. In all biog- 
raphy I know of but one other book so good as 
his letters to shame one out of despondency and 
stir one to braver living. They are full of hard 
work and danger and good cheer. One winter 
morning he found himself amid a frightened crew 
on a dismantled hulk that was drifting up and 
down the Adriatic Sea. " There stood by me this 
night," he told them, " the angel of God, whose 
I am, and whom I serve, and he said, i Fear not, 
Paul ; thou must be brought before Caesar ; and 
God has given thee, also, all those that sail with 
thee.' Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer, for I 
believe God it shall be even as it was told 
me." Paul felt that he had not been born to be 
drowned, — not because he had as yet done so 
much, but because he had so much yet to do, for 
the God to whom he belonged ; and that glad con- 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 83 

viction of being in God's employ, that full conse- 
cration to his service, became angels that first 
brightened, then saved, the whole ship's company. 
Eead the story in Acts xxvu. A few chapters 
before, we read how this same man once had his 
clothes torn off, had many stripes laid on him, 
was thrust into prison, and sat there through the 
evening with his feet fast in the stocks, and — " at 
midnight Paul sang praises unto God." Think 
what that pilloried singer's place has been in the 
history of our religion. It was he who saved 
Christianity from being simply a small new sect 
sprung up among Jewish mechanics and fisher- 
men. He was the blowing wind to that rare 
flower of Galilee, by which its seed and leaves 
were wafted out to become the healing of nations. 
That was his mission, and how did he accomplish 
it ? In this way : Brought up a Pharisee of the 
Pharisees, he first conquered his own race-pride 
and religious prejudices — hardest work of all; 
then took into his heart that gospel, and more 
than that gospel, which he had first trampled 
under foot in blood, and bore it forth, almost a 
single man, into the broad Gentile world. And 
this in utmost privation and danger. " From the 
Jews five times received I forty stripes save one, 



84 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

thrice was I beaten with rods, once stoned, in 
prisons oft, thrice in shipwreck" (before this 
time) ; " a night and a day have I been in the 
deep." He knew the perils of the wilderness, 
and had been in the hands of robbers. He knew 
the perils of city mobs, and had escaped over the 
walls by night, while every gate was guarded that 
he might be caught. The perils of heathen, of 
countrymen, of false brethren, he knew, besides 
" weariness and painfulness and watchings often, 
besides hunger and thirst and fastings often, and 
cold and nakedness." All these were the natural 
and recurring incidents of that service to which 
he felt himself commissioned. What a life his 
was, compared with the life that most of us lead ! 
It is simply laughable to compare it with the shel- 
tered safety, the half-endeavor, and the three- 
fourths private spirit, of most of us. And yet this 
man bore down upon his end, through all this 
press of opposing circumstance, with the most 
indomitable cheer. Why do I say "And yet " ? 
He could not have done it otherwise. Faith, con- 
secration, self-lavishing, cheer, was the order of 
his life. Count up your disappointments and 
obstacles, and then hear him as he calls all his 
" the light affliction which is but for a moment," 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 85 

"sufferings not worthy to be compared with 
the glory." Troubled ? " On every side," Per- 
plexed ? Of course. Persecuted, cast down ? 
Abundantly. But that was all. "Not distressed, 
not in despair, never forsaken, not destroyed"; 
"as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet 
making many rich ; as having nothing, yet pos- 
sessing all things." His letters are, parts of them, 
all in a tremble of joy ; the words do not hold it ; 
they make us think of larger sounds than words, — 
the sounds of church-bells ringing victory, of 
shouts and psalms and trumpet-blowings and 
great exultings of a people at their joy, — with 
such a mighty cheer does this New Testament man 
go about the world doing New Testament work. 

The one I meant who almost rivals Paul at the 
cheer — and yet I don't believe he could laugh 
like Paul — was all but a contemporary of his, 
an old Greek slave who lived in Rome, named 
Epictetus. Would you keep a doctor in your 
house who gives elixir vitas for his medicine, and 
gives it allopathically, go buy a copy of Epictetus' 
" Discourses." To proclaim his gratitude to the 
Gods he is said to have left this epitaph for him- 
self : " Here lies Epictetus, a slave, a cripple, a 
proverb for poverty, and dear to the immortals ! " 



86 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

Once, Paul-like, he cried : " Show me one who is 
sick, and happy ; in danger, and happy ; dying, 
and happy ; disgraced and happy ; show him to 
me! By heaven, I long to see a Stoic." (A 
Christian, might be our word.) "I must die, — 
and must I die groaning, too? Be fettered, — 
and must I be lamenting, too ? Exiled, — and 
what hinders me, then, from going into exile smil- 
ing and cheerful and serene ? Betray a secret ? 
I will not betray it, for this is in my own power. 
i Then I will chain you.' ' What say you, man, — 
chain me? You will chain my leg; not Zeus 
himself can get the better of my free will." " In 
such things," he thinks, " should philosophers " 
(Christians, you know) "daily exercise them- 
selves." As he did : once, we are told, as his mas- 
ter was putting his leg in the torture, he quietly 
said, " You will break it " ; and, when it broke, 
added as quietly, "Did I not tell* you so?" 
"Ought we not" (he goes on), "whether we dig 
or plow or eat, to sing the hymn to God and praise 
his Providence ? What else can I do, a lame old 
man, but sing hymns to God ? This is my busi- 
ness, and I do it ; and I call on you to join in the 
same song." So spake the brave slave-philos- 
opher. His talks, noted down, in his own words 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 87 

as nearly as possible, by a disciple, have outlived 
old Kome. 

Spirits of the type of Paul and Epictetus live 
to-day. They live and laugh, and laughing give 
the lie to our cowardice, which pleads : " We can- 
not be cheerful, — the pressures are too heavy." 
At all events, it is not pressure that prevents, for 
here is human flesh smiling and singing under 
worse strains and pains than ever we have to bear. 
" It is easy enough to be happy/' said a friend of 
this kind to me. " How ? " "I don't know the 
how, but it's easy." " Is there no secret to it ? " 
I persisted. " I never knew of any secret," she 
replied, "but it's easy." 

Who make the best guides to the inner Springs 
of Cheer ? was the question. Our answer was, 
and it is, " The ackers" 

But is there no secret ? Have not these mar- 
tyrs of the smiling face been fore-braced and fore- 
armed to bear the pressures thus ? There the 
word " temperament " emerges, and the thought of 
"animal" spirits. Yes, the blessed ones! "To one 
ten talents, to another two, to another only one," — 
but sometimes He giveth the equivalent of twenty, 
and the last ten come packed at birth into a happy 



88 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

temperament that beareth all things and doeth 
all things merrily. In truth, many souls arrive 
on the earth predestined thus. Perhaps Paul was 
fore-ordained in this way to write his "Bejoice 
always, and again I say, rejoice, and finally, 
brethren, rejoice," all, as it were, in one line of a 
letter, and to live the line out in that hustled life 
of his. Such splendid living may have been act- 
ually easier for him than it is for some of us to 
bear toothaches so that the home does not suffer 
around us, or to sit, grim but loyal, at a weari- 
some life-task. 

What, then, are the brethren and sisters to do 
who have not happy temperaments ? Give up, 
and say, "It is very well for men born glad to be 
glad, — we would have been born so, too, had we 
been consulted " ? There is better to do than that. 
We can at least watch the glad-faced people and 
see if we can catch any secret from them, — a 
secret perhaps unknown to themselves. I am sure 
there is something more than temperament in this 
business of Good Cheer. There are four secrets, 
at least, which seem to go to the making of Cheer, 
when the Cheer is habitual and can stand strain ; 
four statable rules that train the eye and the heart 
to see the beauty of road-sides and make us go 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 89 

laughing along the life-path. For easy remem- 
brance let us put the recipe into a rhyme, and 
make the rules jingle: 

A task to do, 

And a clear inside; 
A friend to help, 

And the sunny side. 

1. Something to do is the first essential. Busi- 
ness is the raw material of happiness. Idleness 
means self-tire, and there is no tire like self-tire. 
To most men week-days, because work-days, are 
sunnier days than Sundays. " I have had my hap- 
piest summer yet," said my friend who had not 
left the city, " and I never worked so hard." Toil 
must be very severe for the toiler to wonder if 
life be worth living ; but with the idler such a 
wonder is apt to be chronic. Moreover, to turn 
into cheer, one's business needs definite aim and 
continuance ; for everyone craves some visible re- 
sult to his work, and a central life-purpose makes 
the days run of themselves towards result. Few 
things so forlorn as to feel " Another week gone, 
and nothing accomplished ; seven days less to live, 
and nothing to show for the loss." It is one's 
life-purpose, one's daily routine, one's drudgery, 



90 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

if you will, that secures the something-to-show, — 
the real " daily bread " that we pray for. And if 
we love our life-purpose, or if, without being in 
love with it, we yet give ourselves heartily to it, 
putting conscience enough to the task to do it as 
well as we can, then good, sure and visible, comes 
out from our days ; with which reward sure, the 
as sure disappointments of the way grow small 
enough to be generally met with a laugh. 

2, A clear inside, says the rhyme next. To 
get good cheer we must have a good conscience. 
Why ? Because cheer conies from seeing Good; 
and in man, in life, in Nature we mainly see what 
we are ; therefore to see good, we must be good. 
The converse is equally true : to lose bright vision, 
or, at least, the command of bright vision, we need 
only be bad. True, it seems possible to slowly 
numb conscience, to almost paralyze the organ of 
shame and moral renewal. Nature is merciful 
and will deaden the spirit as well as the body, to 
shield it from anguish, allowing the poor soul that 
clings to its sinning the lower hell of torpor in- 
stead of the upper hell of torment. But paresis 
is not Cheer ! Deadening to evil is not sensitizing 
to good, but the very opposite thing. Cheer and 



A RECIPE FOE GOOD CHEER. 91 

its vision of good are functions of life. As long 
as conscience is living, and in proportion as it is 
vital and able to ache, it binds to the Eight ; and 
we may as well hope to jar the planet aside from 
its orbit by stamping upon it as to feel steady 
Good Cheer while we are consciously, deliber- 
ately, persistently doing a wrong. 

3. A friend to help is the third line : that is, 
to get cheer for ourselves, we must make it for 
others. This is the easiest part of the recipe, 
because it is the part that can be practised right 
away and all of the time, and that brings returns 
on the instant. If we feel absolutely blue, down- 
stricken, with no thanksgiving music left in us, 
let us go find somebody who is more down-stricken 
than we. It will be strange if we have to hunt 
long for our somebody. Our worst-off friend is 
the best friend for us just then. Make some one 
else give thanks, thanks that we were born and 
born in his world and are there by his side, and, 
before the night comes, the music of the heart 
will begin again in us. There is nothing like put- 
ting the shine on another's face to put the shine 
on our own. Nine-tenths of all loneliness, sensi- 
tiveness, despondency, moroseness, are connected 



92 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

with personal interests. Turn more of those self- 
ish interests into unselfish ones, and by so much 
we change opportunities for disheartenment into 
their opposite. By a law of Nature, part of her 
beautiful economy, he who lives most for others 
is really living most for himself. This is the 
heart of the Gospel, the secret of Jesus, the true 
" Christian Science." Such a man is glad in soul, 
anyway, and often is one whose mouth, also, God 
filleth with laughter. 

4. And the last of our four rules for Cheer is 
to look on the sunny side of things. Should some 
down-hearted friend suggest that to try to see the 
good in his lot is like trying to extract sunshine 
from cucumbers, remind him that sunshine is just 
what makes cucumbers, and that accordingly it can 
be extracted from them. Few may know how to 
do it, but the lack is not in the vegetable. There 
is sun-force in all things. Connection is direct 
between the light that pours in at the window 
and that which shines in eyes and smiles and tones 
and manners and in thoughts. In all its trans- 
formations it is the heaven-force. " Glorify the 
room ! " was Sidney Smith's way of ordering the 
curtains up, and the obedient glory brimmed his 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 93 

page with laughter-punctuations. Dickens was 
another who wrote his stories with curtains 
up and sunshine streaming through the study. 
Xoupe, "Kejoice," was the old Greek's sunshine- 
way of greeting a friend. " Laugh until I come 
back ! " was Father Taylor's good-bye to Dr. Bar- 
tol, — parsons both. " How is the child ? " called 
up another minister-father forlornly from the foot 
of the stairs, as he entered his home. " ? Peak as 
'oo do when 'oo're laughing ! " came back the voice 
of the sick child in reply. It was the baby who 
preached the Gospel that time. Carlyle, in his 
dyspepsia looking up at the stars, could groan, 
"It's a sad sight!" But the little girl looked 
up at the same sight and said, " Mamma, if the 
wrong side of heaven is so fine, how very beautiful 
the right side must be ! n 

This habit of looking on the laughter side can 
be learned. Ask any person who has won his 
cheer the secret of his victory, and he will quite 
likely tell you a story of some dark day when he 
vowed that he would see sunshine. Lydia Maria 
Child, a woman well-acquainted with trial, has left 
it on record : "I seek cheerfulness in every pos- 
sible way; I read only chipper books; I hang 
prisms in my windows to fill the room with rain- 



94 A ilECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

bows/ 5 Eemember poor Tom Hood : " I heard a 
raven croak, but I persuaded myself it was the 
song of the nightingale; I smelled the smell of 
the mould, but thought of the violets it nour- 
ished." Eemember Southey's Spaniard, who put 
on magnifying glasses when he ate cherries, to 
make them look bigger. Eemember Emerson's 
mud-puddle : 

" But in the mud and scum of things, 
There alway, alway something sings ! " 

Eemember Luther on his sick-bed. Between his 
groans he managed to preach on this wise : 
" These pains and trouble here are like the type 
which the printers set ; as they look now, we have 
to read them backwards, and they seem to have 
no sense or meaning in them; but up yonder, 
when the Lord God prints us off in the life to 
come, we shall find that they make brave reading." 
Only we need not wait until then. Eemember 
Paul again, and Epictetus, and Mother Margery, 
and the old negro auntie, — all of them human 
sun-flowers. 

Purposely I multiply these radiant little anec- 
dotes. It is well to lay some to heart, as old 
ladies carry peppermints to church to cheer them 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 95 

through the sermon ; or, since this, too, is a ser- 
mon, I would rather say, as David carried pebbles 
in his sling to kill the bears and giants with. 
They are good things to have at hand to hurl at 
one's own blue devils. And if we can win this 
habit of looking, not at the shadow, but for the 
light somewhere that shadow proves — not at the 
thorn, but at the rose that comes with the thorn — 
if we can win this habit, we shall find ourselves 
rising into a faith of which this will be the natural 
Credo, and we shall repeat it ten times a day : 
" I believe that everything has a bright side. I 
believe the bright side is God's side. I believe 
that I can look upon God's side, — God's, ( whose 
I am.'" So, for remembrance, take the little 
recipe for Good Cheer once more in its rhyme 
form: 

A task to do, 
And a clear inside ; 

A friend to help, 
And the sunny side. 

But if these four good habits — diligence 
in business, righteousness, fellowship, sun-seek- 
ing — each one by itself — help a soul to Good 
Cheer, how much more will they do so when all 



9G A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

four combine ! For that the name should be no 
less a name than Religiousness. Then we recog- 
nize the genuine Holiness of Laughter, and know 
it is a God-gift. We make such sad mistakes 
about religion. It is the mistakes, and not the 
religion, that puts saints on the sick-list. Never 
think, never think of religion as cutting you off 
from cheer or from merry-making by a hand- 
breadth. Keligiousness is the sense of strength 
everywhere, of help proffered before prayer, of 
peace at command. It is the sense of trust in 
a sympathizing universe. It is the sureness of 
beauty behind beauty, of music within music, — 
and, over all seeming evil and jar, of Goodness 
Supreme. How can a soul, having assurance like 
this, be other than steadily glad ? Indeed, how 
can one be cheer-full, while he has anything less ? 
Eeligiousness is the condition of a soul in full 
health. It is not something added to human 
nature, but our nature coming to blossom and 
fruit-bearing. Every man, by virtue of being a 
man, is religious in germ, in stem, it may be in 
leaves ; but when all in him flowers up to fulfill- 
ment, then we have religion indeed, — the beauty 
and richness of human nature perfecting itself. 
And what has this fact to do with gladness and 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 97 

laughter ? Everything, — unless the scale of 
happiness inverts the scale of creation, and the 
angel may envy the oyster, and the stone's lot 
be heaven, — while G-od is the Broken-Hearted 
Almighty. It cannot be so : it must be that the 
highest perfection is the highest gladness. For 
who — to say it again — who is so strong as he 
who is trusting the universe ? Who is so bold 
as he who feels that nothing can hurt him ? Who 
is so peaceful as one for whom the everlasting 
laws are as music ? Who so light-hearted and 
at the same time so strenuous, so careless and 
yet so indomitable, as one assured in his heart 
that " God," and more than he ca,n possibly mean 
by the name, is friendly, fatherly, to him, — to 
him and to all ? With no surprise, therefore, we 
find it a fact that the men and women of most 
even cheer — mark that word, even — are men 
and women of deep religiousness ; souls whole, 
where we are fractional; souls in flower and 
fruit, where ours are only in leaf. 

This cheer stands quite apart from the theolo- 
gies, because religiousness is a thing widely dis- 
tinct from the mind's beliefs. The truer saints 
of every theology laugh, and in all of them the 
cheer is the shine of their trust. Epictetus was 



98 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

what Christians call " heathen/' — none the less 
a brother of Paul, and one of the noble host 
of foreign missionaries for whom right-minded 
Christians heartily bless Heathendom. If any 
one doubts whether the Bible sanctions this idea 
of the holiness of laughter, it shows he is no 
open-eyed reader of the book. The New Testa- 
ment religion a sad religion ! There is much 
about " sin" in it, and that is a sad thing enough ; 
but it is mostly about the way and the joy of 
getting rid of the sin. If one imagines the Bible 
to be a grave book, let him just borrow one and 
count the outbursts of gladness all along the 
pages of Paul, who says more about sin than 
anyone else. Hope and joy and peace and cheer 
and glory are the household words of the New 
Testament. The book begins with Beatitudes, 
and ends with pictures of a Heaven on the earth. 
Jesus at first appears like a bridegroom, and 
the disciples are wedding-guests ; the weary he 
calls into rest ; his favorite phrase is " the king- 
dom of heaven/' and almost everything under 
the sun seems to him " like to the kingdom of 
heaven " ; at the close, in the face of death, he 
shares his fullness of "joy," and his bequest 
to his dearest is "my peace." True, there is 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 99 

another, a tragic, side to his story ; true that we 
know little about him, and that the little does not 
suggest a man who makes meriy. But if Jesus 
were not a man of a glad within, could he — 
I will not say, have pressed forward to death as 
he did, for a clear expectation of death in one's 
work is often anything but a sadness — but could 
he have pressed forward to death attracting the 
children to him, and making the outcasts love 
him ? Sometime you must read George Mac- 
donald's "Alec Forbes/' and note what little 
Annie thought about Jesus : " We dinna hear 
that the Savior himself ever so much as smiled," 
said a good man to Annie. " I am not sure he 
did not, for a' that," she answered ; " I am think- 
ing, if one of the bairnies that he took on his 
knee — and he was ill-pleased, you know, with 
those who shoo'd them away — if one of them 
had holden up his wee timmer horsie with a 
broken leg, and had prayed him to work a mir- 
acle and mend the leg, he wouldn't ha' wrought 
a miracle, I dare say, but he would have smiled 
or laughed a wee, and he would have mended the 
leg in some way or other to please the bairnie. 
And if it had been mine," said Annie, " I would 
rather have had the mending of his own twa 



100 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

hands, with a knife to help them, maybe, than 
twenty miracles upon it." I think Annie's 
Jesus — a man who could smile and at times 
laugh a wee — must be nearer the fact than the 
Jesus we usually see in the pictures. One may 
fancy anything he will of Jesus' face, and I fancy 
him one of those life-helpers who rarely smile, 
but who, when they do — " Their splendid smiles 
friends fain would keep to light the world with." 
No, never believe that smiles and laughter are, 
necessarily, signs of unearnestness. They may 
be that ; but they may be the surface-play that 
tops the deep mains of earnestness. The water 
sparkles in the brook, but tumultuous laughter 
twinkles wide over the ocean also. Your sombre 
men are, at best, the second and third-rate men; 
not the flippant and frivolous, above the average 
often,. but seldom the saints, the heroes, the lead- 
ers of men. If a strenuous soul be sad, so much 
the worse for him and his cause. So far he is a 
man of mistake and unfaith. He is trying to 
shoulder more of the universe than one man can 
carry. More than a man can carry comfortably 
is a man's share, — there is so much to be carried. 
We ought to strain and stagger at times, — but 
not to stagger long-faced. Let us trust God and, 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 101 

right in the strain, we may find our mouth 
filling with his gift of laughter. Loneliness, 
raoroseness, discontent, impatience, anxiety — 
leave them for unreligiousness. The grim face, 
the " brow-contracting sort," belongs not to one 
who feels, as he walks, that he walks with God. 
For him the open look, the laughing eye, the 
ready greeting to any and all, as if from "a heart 
at leisure from itself." 

It remains to be said that, of course, there are 
differing manifestations of Cheer. Merriment, 
though a good thing, is not essential to it. One's 
smile is a deeper thing than one's laugh : it is 
not a half-laugh, but a stilled whole laugh, — 
laughter become organic, instinctive, and part of 
one's structure. Emerson, the apostle of opti- 
mism, laughed aloud so seldom that, when he did, 
it made a rare anecdote ; but Emerson's smile had 
a wide fame of its own. But apart from the face 
and what happens thereon, with some persons the 
Cheer is a bubbling joy, with some a breezy enthu- 
siasm, with some it is courage with humor, with 
some a clear-shining quiet. The rippling spirits 
of a young child are the cheer of a thought-free 
heart ; the quieter merriment of full manhood is 



102 A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 

the cheer of a seeing, but unshrinking, heart. A 
religious-hearted man of fifty is a kind of old 
child, and " of such is the kingdom of heaven." 
The seventh heaven must be full of old children. 
Within each individual, too, the Cheer changes 
expression as years pass on ; but it never need 
wholly lose the child's ripple, nor wholly the 
youth's enthusiasm, as it turns into the happy 
courage and laughing philosophy of manhood or 
the bright seriousness of womanhood, and, later 
still, into the serenity brooding in age, when one 
begins to wonder at the long fret in which he has 
spent his life. But in all its forms it is in its 
essence trust — trust unconscious or conscious — 
in Goodness. And as it grows from trust uncon- 
scious to conscious, can one help being a gladder- 
hearted creature at thirty than at twenty years 
of age, at sixty than at thirty ? 

Slowly a great book is being written by the 
race. To make it men will take parts of our 
Bible, and parts from many another scripture, 
old and new and yet to be, and bind them together 
in what will be recognized as a Bible for Human- 
ity. When that book is opened, it will be found 
to be from end to end News of Gladness from the 
Heart of the Universe. Slowly the ideal of a 



A RECIPE FOR GOOD CHEER. 103 

great life is growing in the race. It will hold 
the better parts of all old earnestness and beauty 
and self-sacrifice. When we look towards it, we 
shall think of Jesus, of Paul, of all best fulfill- 
ments of service. It will make us think of 
children, too, because of its instinctive and un- 
conscious joy. And it will make us think of 
God, and give man a new ideal of him, because 
of its deeps of conscious joy. And the earnest- 
ness and the joy, in man and in God, will be 
recognized each as a part of the other. 

" I think this is the authentic sign and seal 
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad 
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts 
Into a rage to suffer for mankind 
And recommence at sorrow," — 

so to lead all sorrow up "through pain to joy, 
more joy, and most joy," till all men stand in 
singing places, giving thanks to God. 




THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

There is a Bible verse that reads, "A building 
of God, a house not made with hands." Paul 
meant the spiritual body in which, he says, the 
soul will live hereafter. But how well the words 
describe the Home, — a home right here on earth ! 

"<&xwpt t\)t ILorfc femltf tfje Jjouse"— 

In a sense worth noting the very house itself, 
the mere shell of the home, is that — " a building 
of God, not made with hands." Watch two birds 
foraging to build their nest. They preempt a 
crook in a bough or a hole in the wall, some tiny 
niche or other in the big world, and, singing to 
each other that this is their tree-bough, their 
hole, they bring a twig from here, a wisp of hay 
from there, a tuft of soft moss, the tangle of 
string which the school-boy dropped, the hair 



108 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL 

that the old horse rubbed off on the pasture-bars, 
and weave and mould their findings into a cosy 
bowl to hold their little ones. Man and woman 
are but larger birds, borrowing more of the world- 
material to make a bigger bowl a little cosier. 
From a fellow-mortal they buy a lot or a farm 
instead of a tree-bough 3 they fence it in and call 
it theirs, as if they owned the acres through to 
China, — and put a mortgage on it, notwithstand- 
ing, because it is too large to pay for. Then 
they build four walls with a lid, to box in a little 
of the blowing wind; screw on this box a door- 
plate and insurance-sign; divide it inside into 
chambered cells ; line these cells with paper and 
carpets instead of moss and horse-hair ; and pro- 
ceed to fill their pretty box of cells with decora- 
tions and conveniences. This is their " home." 
" See what my hands have built ! " says the man. 
But if we look with eyes that do see, what we 
see is this ; — that all he calls his handiwork is 
nothing but the bird's work; first, a foraging 
on Nature for material, then a re-arranging, re- 
combining of the plunder. 

For consider the house, how it grows ! The 
first thing we do is to dig a hole in the 
planet, — a socket to hold the house down firm. 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 109 

That is taking liberties with Nature to begin with, 
as we only make the hole, she room for the hole, — 
the more momentous matter. Then the cellar- 
walls, — do we make them ? We quarry the stone, 
drag it out, chip it square, lay it in the mortar- 
beds ; but the stone was laid in the quarry for us 
atom by atom, crystal by crystal, ages before the 
first man trod the earth. A bit of pavement from 
Pompeii, a fragment from the pyramids, is prized 
because man's touch was on it two thousand or 
thrice two thousand years ago ; but each pebble 
in the chinks of the cellar-wall beneath us holds 
thousands of thousands of years locked up in it, 
since first the ancient oceans sifted it and inner 
earth-fires baked it and thickening continents 
began to squeeze it into rock. 

Then over these foundations we lay the sills 
and raise the frame. But who made the timber 
in the joist, who made the clapboards and the 
shingles on the roof? Men hewed and sawed 
and split, — the great mills with their iron claws 
and iron teeth are wonders of human skill ; but 
what hands took sunshine and the rain and a 
pine-cone a hundred years ago in a wild forest, 
and with winter storms and spring freshenings 
and long summer shinings built up the countless 



110 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

cells and fibres into the great green tree, that 
waited on the hill-side till the axe-man came ? 

And thus we might consider each and every- 
thing about our house, the iron in the nail, the 
wool in the carpet, the glass in the window, the 
paint on the door, the hair in the easy chair, and 
trace all back by no long road to builders who 
built not by hand. We are proud of our nine- 
teenth century mansion ; but if we use the very 
latest improvements and most artificial, — make 
its outer walls of machine-pressed stone; for 
inner walls buy fibrous slabs instead of laths and 
mortar ; iron-rib it through and through in place 
of floor-beams; fire-proof its floors with iron- 
netting and plaster; warm it by steam from 
boilers two miles away down town ; light it with 
electricity ; tune it by reverberating telephones 
with music played in a distant capital ; dine in 
it, as to-day the city-dwellers may, on fresh fish 
from the gulf of the St. Lawrence, fresh beef 
from Montana, fresh pears from California — 
still, what are we doing but coaxing a little more 
of world-material from Mother Nature than the 
forefathers had learnt the art of coaxing from 
her when they were furnishing their plain log 
huts ? Foraging on Nature like the birds, and 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. Ill 

re-arranging the plunder, — that is all there is 
of it. 

" I heard a voice out of heaven," says another 
Bible verse, — "a great voice out of heaven, 
'Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, 
and he will dwell with them, and they shall 
be his people.' " Call the great Power " God," 
or by what name we will, that Power dwells 
with us in so literal a fashion that every stone 
and rafter, every table, spoon and paper scrap, 
bears stamp and signature to eyes that read 
aright : " The house in which we live is a build- 
ing of God, a house not made with hands." 

S?0usedfttrmsl)mg. 

In this immanence of miracle, this domestica- 
tion of the infinite, we have not gone beyond the 
bare house yet. But how much more than house 
is Home ! Cellar and walls and roof, chairs and 
tables and spoons, — these are the mere shell of 
the Home. These, to be sure, are what the young 
couple talk much about when waiting for the 
wedding, and this is what the architects and 
carpenters and house-furnishing stores are for. 
And under city slates and country shingles alike, 



112 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

one sometimes finds unfortunates to whom this 
mere outside, these solid things about the rooms, 
seem to be mainly what they think of when 
they think of the rooms ; unfortunates to whom 
the show of their furniture is of more impor- 
tance than its use; men more interested in 
the turkey on the table than in the people who 
sit around the turkey ; women who think more 
of the new carpet than the blessing of the old 
sunshine ; men and women, both, who bear wit- 
ness that they love their neighbors better than 
themselves by keeping best things for the neigh- 
bors' eyes and the worst things for their own, 
and who almost gauge their social standing by 
the fine clothes they can put on for street or 
church, or by the "dead perfection " of their 
front parlor. Perhaps the good wife, looking 
around a slovenly, ^home-like living-room, feels 
a flush of self-respect at the thought of that cold 
front parlor, where the chairs sit as straight as 
the pictures ought to, and the tapestries and 
crockeries are each in the due place. When call- 
ing at a rich man's home and waiting for Madame 
to appear, sometimes a silent wonder rises, " Do 
the people correspond to all this gilt and var- 
nish and upholstery ? " And in a humbler house, 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 113 

when shown into one of those polar parlors, a 
kind of homesickness comes over one for some 
back parlor, some kitchen, a bed-room, any place 
where the people really live. The heart cries, 
" Take me where the people stay ; I didn't come 
to see the chairs." A second thought is apt to 
follow, — how much more pleasant, tasteful, home- 
like every other room in the house would probably 
become, if the expense hidden in this one room 
were but distributed, there in a prettier paper, 
there in a quieter carpet, there in a noble picture, 
and all about in a dozen little graces and con- 
veniences, — if these were added there, where all 
the time they would be enjoyed by the owners 
and the users. On the other hand, one is some- 
times shown into a room, on entering which he 
feels like bowing to its emptiness in gratitude, 
because it offers, even bare of the people who 
evidently do live in it, a festival so cosy to the 
eyes. Everywhere are uses in forms of beauty. 
Uses in forms of beauty, — that is the secret of 
a festival for eyes. In such cases it is quite in 
order to sing our little psalm praising the good 
looks of the room and the things in it that make 
it pleasant. That is what they are for, — to 
please ; in part, to please us, the chance-comers ; 



114 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

but not us first, and the home-folk last, — the 
home-folk first, and us outsiders last. Petition 
to see a friend's room before feeling that you 
really know that friend. It is a better test than 
a bureau-drawer! Not the room after a quick 
run up-stairs for two minutes first, but the room 
just as it is. For a room as it is usually kept is 
index of one's taste, of one's culture, and of a 
good deal of one's character. 



& 



SHje E&eai of ffieautg. 

I am not objecting one whit to grace in the 
household furnishings, nor to expense laid out to 
get the grace. On the contrary, there is nothing 
beyond bare necessities on which expense may be 
so well laid out. As the elementary thing that 
shows one's house is not merely a hand-made 
house, I would name Taste ; the taste that shows 
itself in pictures, in flowers, in music, in the 
choice of colors for the walls and the floors, in 
the amenities of the mantel-piece and table, in the 
grouping of the furniture, in the droop of the 
curtains at the windows, in the way in which the 
dishes glorify the table, in which the dresses sit 
on the mother and the girls. And it is the morn- 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 115 

ing dress and the Monday table that tells the 
story. Where can you buy good taste ? That 
cannot be rnanu-f actured. Like Solomon's " wis- 
dom," it cannot be gotten for gold, nor silver be 
paid for the price thereof ; but in house-furnish- 
ing it is more precious than fine rubies. It is 
the one thing that no store in New York or 
Chicago sells, nor can rich relatives leave you 
any of it in their wills. And yet it comes largely 
by bequest. Nearly all one can tell about its 
origin is that it gathers slowly in the family 
blood, and refines month by month, as children 
watch the parents' ways and absorb into them- 
selves the grace that is about the rooms. 

But what a difference it makes to those children 
by and by ! What a difference it makes in the 
feeling of the home, if things graceful to the eye 
and ear are added to the things convenient for the 
flesh and bones ! Our eyes and ears are parts of 
us ; if less important than the heart and mind, still 
are parts of us, and a home should be home for all 
our parts. Eyes and ears are eager to be fed with 
harmonies in color and form and sound ; these 
are their natural food as much as bread and meat 
are food for other parts. And in proportion as 
the eyes and ears are fed, we are not sure, but 



116 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

apt, to see a fineness spreading over life. Where 
eyes and ears are starved, we are not sure, but 
apt, to find a roughness spreading. A song at 
even-time before the little ones say Good-night ; 
the habit of together saying a Good-morning grace 
to God, perhaps a silent grace, among the other 
greetings of a happy breakfast-table ; a picture 
in that bare niche of the wall ; a vase of flowers 
on the mantel-piece ; well matched colors under 
foot ; a nestling collar, not that stiff band, around 
the neck; brushed boots, if boots it must be, 
when the family are all together ; the tea-table 
tastefully, however simply, set, instead of dishes 
in a huddle, — these all are little things; you 
would hardly notice them as single things ; you 
would not call them "religion," they are not 
" morals," they scarcely even class under the head 
of "manners." Men and women can be good 
parents and valuable citizens without them. And 
yet, and yet, one cannot forget that, as the years 
run on, these trifles of the home will make no 
little of the difference between coarse grain and 
fine grain in us and in our children, when they 
grow up. 

Besides, this taste for grace is nothing hard to 
gratify in these days. It is much harder to get 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 117 

the good taste than the means by which to gratify 
it. Not splendor, but harmony, is grace; not 
many things, but picturesque things. The ideals 
of beauty are found in simple, restful things far 
oftener than in ornate things. Of two given 
forms for the same article — a chair, a table, a 
dress — the form that is least ornate is commonly 
the more useful, and this more useful form will 
commonly by artist eyes be found the handsomer. 
A man in his working-clothes is usually more 
picturesque than that same man in his Sunday 
clothes ; the living-room more picturesque than 
the parlor. "Avoid the superfluous/' is a recipe 
that of itself would clear our rooms of much 
unhandsome handsomeness. Scratch out the 
verys from your talk, from your writing, from 
your house-furnishing. A certain sentence, only 
eight words long, did me great good as a young- 
man. I met it in Grimm's Life of Michael 
Angelo : " The ideal of beauty is simplicity and 
reposed The ideal of beauty is simplicity and 
repose : it applies to everything, — to wall-papers 
and curtains and carpets and table-cloths, to dress, 
to manners, to talk, to sermons, to style in writ- 
ing, to faces, to character. The ideal of beauty 
is simplicity and repose, — not flash, not sensa- 



118 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

tion, not show, not exaggeration, not bustle. 
And because simple, beautiful things are not 
necessarily costly, it needs no mint of money to 
have really choice pictures on one's wall, now 
that photography has been invented, and the sun 
shines to copy Baphael's Madonna and Millet's 
peasants and William Hunt's boys and maidens 
for us, or the sculpture of an Alpine valley and 
a cathedral front. A very little outlay, the 
dinners cheapened for a month, will make the 
bare dining-room so beautiful that plain dinners 
ever afterwards taste better in it; it really is 
economy and saves a course. 

JFlofoer jhtrmture* 

And without any money at all, what grace the 
fields and gardens offer us, if only we have eyes 
to see it, hearts to love it, hands to carry it home ! 
I knew a woman, among friends counted poor, 
whose room was a place to go around and praise 
and be thankful and delighted for, so much did 
she have of this faculty of transferring Nature 
to the inside of a house. Mosses and ferns and 
dried autumn-leaves were her chief materials; 
but the eyes and the hands and the taste were 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 119 

added in, and rich men could not buy her result. 
To be a growing flower anywhere is to be 
beautiful. " Consider the lilies/' said the young 
Hebrew prophet ; and when we do consider them, 
we want some of them nearer than the field. 
The Arabs put into Mahomet's, their prophet's, 
lips the saying: "If a man find himself with 
bread in both hands, he should exchange one loaf 
for some flowers of the narcissus, since the loaf 
feeds the body indeed, but the flowers feed the 
soul." Flowers have no speech nor language, but 
they are living creatures, and, when transplanted 
from their own home-haunts to ours, they claim 
the captive's due of tenderness, and they will 
reward love, like a child, with answering loveli- 
ness. In their religious rhyming to the woods 
and fields outside, the seasons faithfully remem- 
bered in captivity, their wondrous resurrections, 
their mystic chemistry that in our corner bed- 
rooms carries on Creation, constructing green leaf 
and glowing petal and strange incense out of earth 
and water and the window sunlight, the little 
exiles of the flower-pot bear mute witness that 
the house wherein they live is "a building of 
God, a house not made with hands." 



120 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 



Book jFurmture. 

We must say a word about two other things, 
seldom thought of as house-furnishings. One of 
them is our Books. Think what a " book " means. 
It means meeting a dime-novel hero, if we like 
that kind of hero. But it also means meeting 
the poets, the thinkers, the great men, the gen- 
uine heroes, if we like that kind. It means admis- 
sion to the new marvels of science, if one choose 
admission. It means an introduction to the 
noblest company that all the generations have 
generated, if we claim the introduction. Kemem- 
bering this, how can one help wishing to furnish 
his house with some such furniture ? A poet for 
a table-piece! A philosopher Upon the shelf! 
Tyndall and Darwin, in their works, for members 
of the household ! Browning or Emerson for a 
fireside friend! Irving or Dickens or G-eorge 
Eliot to make us laugh and cry and grow tender 
to queer folk and forlorn ! Or some of the good 
newspapers, — not those that, on the plea of giv- 
ing " news," parade details of the divorces and 
the murders gleaned from Maine to Florida, 
details of the brute game of the prize-fighter and 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 121 

the shames of low city life, — not this red, rank 
meat to hang around one's mind, as if it were a 
butcher's shop ; but newspapers that tell how the 
great world is moving on in politics and business 
and thought and knowledge and humanity. To 
subscribe for one of these last is truest house- 
furnishing. A family's rank in thought and 
taste can be well gauged by the books and papers 
that lie upon the shelf or table in the living-room. 
There are three or four books which a man owes 
to his family as much as he owes them dinner or 
clothes, — a good newspaper (that is, one new 
book daily), a good dictionary, a good atlas, and, 
if he can possibly afford it, a good cyclopaedia. 
A boy asked his mother a difficult question and 
got the answer, " 1 don't know." " Well," said 
he, " I think mothers ought to know. They ought 
to be well educated, or else have an encyclopaedia." 
That boy was right. And if we own no more 
than these four books just named, they are four 
presences to day and night remind us that their 
house and ours is a house not wholly " made with 
hands." 



122 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 



®ur (Guests* 



Another thing which passes manufacture is 
our Guests. They are surely as important a part 
of the household furniture as the chairs we buy 
for them to sit on. A house that merely holds 
its inmates, and to the rest of the town is a barred 
place, good, like a prison, to keep out of, can 
hardly be a " home " to those who live in it. It 
must be pleasant to a woman to know the children 
like to look up at her windows as they run to 
school, hoping for her smile ; it must be a pleas- 
ure to a man to know the neighbors look forward 
to an evening around his fireside or a chat and 
laugh over his tea-table. The truest hospitality 
is shown not in the effort to entertain, but in the 
depth of welcome. What a guest loves to come, 
and come again, for is not the meal, but those 
who sit at the meal. If we remembered this, 
more homes would be habitually thrown open to 
win the benedictions upon hospitality. It is our 
ceremony, not our poverty, it is self -consciousness 
of tener than inability to be agreeable, that makes 
us willing to live cloistered. Seldom is it that 
the pleasantest homes to visit are the richest. 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 123 

The real compliment is not to apologize for the 
simple fare. That means trust, and trust is 
better than fried oysters. One of my dearest 
haunts used to be a home where we had bread and 
butter for the fare, and the guest helped to toast 
the bread and wipe the dishes ; but the welcome 
and the children and the wit and the songs, and 
the quiet talk after the children went to bed, 
made it a rare privilege to be admitted there. If 
the dinner be a loaf of bread and a pitcher of 
water, invite your friend rather than incur that 
opposite reputation, that it is " a kind of burglary 
to ring your door-bell before dinner." Count 
guests who are always glad to come and always 
make you glad they come, as best pieces in your 
household furnishing ; and those who are glad to 
come, without the power of making us so glad, — 
count some of these as reasons why the house 
was built. 

Ojc tear "GTogetfjenuss." 

And still one thing remains to furnish the 
House Beautiful, the most important thing of 
all, without which guests and books and flowers 
and pictures and harmonies of color only empha- 
size the fact that the house is not a home. I 



124 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

mean the warm light in the rooms that comes 
from kind eyes, from quick unconscious smiles, 
from gentleness in tones, from little unpremed- 
itated caresses of manner, from habits of f ore- 
thoughtf ulness for one another, — all that happy 
illumination which, on the inside of a house, cor- 
responds to morning sunlight outside falling on 
quiet dewy fields. It is an atmosphere really 
generated of many self-controls, of much forbear- 
ance, of training in self-sacrifice ; but by the time 
it reaches instinctive expression these stern gen- 
erators of it are hidden in the radiance resulting. 
It is like a constant love-song without words, 
whose meaning is, " We are glad that we are alive 
together" It is a low pervading music, felt, not 
heard, which begins each day with the Good- 
morning, and only ends in the dream-drowse 
beyond Good-night. It is cheer ; it is peace ; it 
is trust ; it is delight ; it is all these for, and all 
these in, each other. It knows no moods — this 
warm love-light, — but it is an even cheer, an even 
trust. The little festivals of love are kept, but, 
after all, the best days are the every-days because 
they are the every-days of love. The variant 
dispositions in the members of the home, the 
elements of personality to be " allowed for," add 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 125 

stimulus and exhilaration to this atmosphere. 
Shared memories make part of it, shared hopes 
and fears, shared sorrows ; shared self-denials 
make a very dear part of it. 

Thus is it at its happy best ; but even when 
the home-love is not at its best, when moods at 
times prevail, and cold looks make a distance in 
the eyes, and some one grows recluse and selfish 
to the rest, even then the average and wont of 
love may keep the home not wholly undeserving 
of its coronation name, "a building of God, a 
house not made with hands." Certainty love is 
the force by which, and home the place in which, 
God chiefly fashions souls to their fine issues. 
Is our mere body fearfully and wonderfully made ? 
A greater marvel is the human mind and heart 
and conscience. To make these, homes spring 
up the wide world over. In them strength fits 
itself to weakness, experience fits itself to igno- 
rance, protection fits itself to need. They are 
life-schools in which the powers of an individual 
are successively awaked and trained as, year by 
year, he passes on through the differing relations 
of child, youth, parent, elder, in the circle. From 
the child's relations to the others come obedience, 
reverence, trust, — the roots of upward growth. 



126 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

Youth's new relations bring self-control and self- 
reliance, justice, and the dawns of duty owed one's 
world. Later, when little ones in turn demand 
our care, mother-providence and father-providence 
emerge in us, and energies of self-forgetting, and 
the full response of human nature to the great 
appeal to be good for love's sake. Lastly, old age 
with its second leisure and dependence brings 
moderation, patience, peace, and a sense of wide 
horizons opening. And, all the process through, 
love is the shaping force, and home-relations are 
the well-springs of the love. 

If this may be called the story of soul-making 
for us all, of none is it so mystically, beautifully 
true a story as of the blessed " twos." Mystically 
true of them, because the love of twos begins in 
miracle, and the miracle never wholly dies away 
even when the days of Golden Wedding near. A 
mystery like that of birth and that of death is 
the mystery of two young spirits all unconsciously 
through distant ways approaching, each fated at 
some turn, some instant, to find and recognize the 
other. Follows, then, the second and continuing 
mystery of the two becoming very one. And 
beautifully true of them, — as all beholders know : 
" all men love a lover." Poetry and song, and 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL, i27 

novel and drama, and gossip, older than them all, 
attest the fascination. But to the two themselves 
how passing beautiful the story is ! It is not 
merely that all Nature glows and old familiar 
things take on new lights and meanings; nor 
merely that in the new light the dearest old 
ties dim by some divine eclipse, 

"As o'er the hills and far away 
Beyond their utmost purple rim, 
Beyond the night, beyond the day, 
The happy princess follows him." 

Not merely this : a higher beauty comes in the 
changes so swiftly wrought by love within each 
soul, — the enlargement of powers, the enhance- 
ment of attractiveness, the virtues greatened, the 
meanness abated, and that unselfing of each one 
for the other's sake, which really makes each one 
a stronger, nobler self. The sunrise of the new 
life breaks. The two are mated with the solemn 
questions : "Wilt thou love her, honor her, cher- 
ish and comfort her, in health and in sickness, 
in joy and in sorrow, so long as ye both shall 
live?" "Wilt thou take him for richer, for 
poorer, for better, for worse, and try to live with 
him the divinest life thou knowest?" Then 



128 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

begin the daily, hourly answers to these ques- 
tions, — living answers so different from the 
worded " I will " of the moment. And now the 
home-nest, and the delights of it, the discoveries 
of it, the revelations in it of still unmated parts 
which yet must mate and will, the glad endeavors 
of it, all begin. Now poems, only making dear 
a printed page a little while before, sing them- 
selves out as glad experience: 

" Two birds within one nest; 

Two hearts within one breast; 

Two souls within one fair 

Firm league of love and prayer, 
Together bound for aye, together blest; 

An ear that waits to catch 

A hand upon the latch ; 
A step that hastens its sweet rest to win ; 

A world of care without; 

A world of strife shut out ; 

A world of love shut in ! " 

Slowly the new home grows holy as the deep- 
ening wedding thus goes on ; holy, for the making 
of two souls — two yet one — is going on in it. 
Each soul is overcoming its own faults for love's 
sake, and helping by love to overcome the other's 
faults. Business, sorrows, joys, temptations, fail- 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 



129 



ures, victories, ideals, are all shared in it. By and 
by the awes of motherhood and fatherhood are 
shared, and the new co-education that children 
bring their parents is entered on together. The 
supreme beauty is attained when both realize that 
the inmost secret of true marriage is — to love 
the ideals better than each other. For this alone 
guarantees the perfect purity, and therefore this 
alone can guarantee the lastingness of love. 
Literally, literally so! 

" I could uot love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not honor more." 

Emerson's words are the motto for all marriage- 
chambers: "They only can give the key and 
leading to better society ivho delight in each other 
only because both delight in the eternal laws ; who 
forgiye nothing to each other; who by their joy 
and homage to these are made incapable of con- 
ceit." And so the divine end of beauty is ful- 
filled — the purification of souls, the ennoblement 
of personality. 

By far the best love-story that I know among 
the books is a true one, " The Story of William 
and Lucy Smith n ; a sad, triumphant love-story 



130 THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

that leads the reader far along the heights of life 
and death. These two had no children at their 
side ; they had no wealth to buy them graceful 
things ; their very roof they could not call their 
own ; and they only lived eleven years together. 
But they lived these years a lofty life in all the 
full sweet meanings of together. " Togetherness n 
is the quaint word in which Lucy tried to sum 
and hint the happiness. So when I think of the 
House Beautiful, "the building of God, not made 
with hands/' I think of them. He said to her, 
looking up into her face not long before his death : 
" I think you and I should have made a happy 
world, if we were the only two in it." She said 
of him, closing the little memoir that she wrote : 
"Of him every memory is sweet and elevating; 
and I record here that a life-long anguish, such 
as defies words, is yet not too high a price to 
pay for the privilege of having loved him and 
belonged to him." 

I dreamed of Paradise, — and still, 
Though sun lay soft on vale and hill, 
And trees were green and rivers bright, 
The one dear thing that made delight 
By sun or stars or Eden weather, 
Was just that we two were together. 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 131 

I dreamed of Heaven, — and God so near ! 

The angels trod the shining sphere, 
And all were beautiful ; the days 
Were choral work, were choral praise ; 
And yet, in Heaven's far-shining weather, 
The best was still, — we were together ! 

I woke — and found my dream was true, 

That happy dream of me and you ! 

For Eden, Heaven, no need to roam; 

The fortaste of it all is Homey 
Where you and I through this world's weather 
Still work and praise and thank together. 

Together weave from love a nest 
For all that's good and sweet and blest 
To brood in, till it come a face, 
A voice, a soul, a child's embrace ! 

And then what peace of Bethlehem weather, 

What songs, as we go on together ! 

Together greet life's solemn real, 

Together own one glad ideal, 

Together laugh, together ache, 

And think one thought, " each other's sake," 

And hope one hope — in new-world weather 

To still go on, and go together. 






UA 6 ?9 






